Xiangming Chen
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Xiangming Chen is the dean and director of the Center
for Urban and Global Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor
of Global Urban Studies and Sociology
at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is also
a distinguished guest professor in the School of
Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in Shanghai.
His (co)authored and co-edited
books include As Borders
Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim, Shanghai
Rising: State Power and
Local Transformations in a Global Megacity, and Rethinking
Global Urbanism: Comparative Insights
from Secondary Cities. |
abstract
Commercial Development from Below:
A Portrait
of Shanghai Through the Tianzifang
Shopping Area
As a global city with a cosmopolitan history and driven by powerful state
planning, Shanghai’s rapid
transformation over the last three
decades is both complex and contentious. While any way of looking at this complexity
and contention will end up
with an incomplete view, I offer
a rare portrait of Shanghai through
a bottom-up lens on the intersected
space of commercial and social activities
in a quasi-planned but more
spontaneously developed
shopping area named Tianzifang.
This portrait of Shanghai is constructed from a deep ethnographic study I have conducted
in collaboration with Shanghai-based
scholars, which is part of a transnational
collaborative project on two
local shopping streets in each of six global cities. (A book based on this project entitled
Global Cities, Local Streets, edited
by Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz,
and Xiangming Chen, will be
published by Routledge in July 2015.) In presenting this distinctive portrait of Shanghai, I use two complementary types of
information: 1) a documentary video shot in the Tianzifang area and narrated by a key local researcher, and 2) a set of
in-depth interview narratives by select shop owners. I show globalization, migration (both international and domestic), and
the role of the (local)
state are experienced and embodied
by shopkeepers, customers,
and passersby in the bounded
and intimate small spaces of everyday
life and diversity.
I focus on how the contact
and tension between the
global and the local, between
the state and the market, between the “exotic” and the “authentic,”
between cultural innovation
and mass commerce, and between
newcomers and longtime residents play out through the daily routine of commercial transactions
and social interactions in this
area. The ultimate purpose of this
portrait is to counter the prevailing image and
narrative of Shanghai being transformed
by powerful global capital, large-scale state
planning, and sweeping urban
redevelopment.
By focusing on the origin
and evolution of the Tianzifang
shopping area, I document the resurgence
of commercial development from below
based on the resilience of local shops as
a distinctive character in
a time of rapid urban change.
Key Words Global City, Local Street, Role of the State, Commercial Development from Below, Shanghai