Abstract

Preserving a city’s rich cultural heritage may require a balancing act when weighed against market demand. Shanghai’s historic row houses, known as the lilong – a legacy of Western-influenced housing during the city’s time as a treaty port (1842-1943) – are facing extinction at the hands of post-reform property developers seeking valuable land for high-rise condo development. Once the realm of local servants and Chinese laborers, the lilong have come to symbolize the pressures of industrialization as migrants from across the country have settled in – China’s first encounter with spatial modernity. Through academic discourse, nostalgia has led the claim that the lilong should by all means be preserved even for its historic value per se. Here I argue: do we really understand enough about the existence of the lilong in the context of the rapidly changing structure of modern Chinese society to make such a claim? All study of contemporary urbanization must begin with a study of its residents’ processes of adaptation to their radically modernized identities as buffeted by social and political change, which is different from the study of the image that is being projected about its residents’ lives either by scholars on one side or by governments on the other. I will explore the dimensions from which urban housing could be studied in the globalizing processes whereby apparently property-led development is becoming standard urban planning practice, with its concomitant influence on the lifestyle of the Chinese today.