Abstract

Shanghai's urban development has come to represent China's rapid economic growth and global integration following the country's accelerated transition to a state-controlled market economy since the 1990s. In the centrally located historic neighbourhoods at the western end of the former French and International Concessions, socio-demographic, cultural, and economic changes are producing a new international trend quarter with a vibe and look echoing the likes of Berlin's Prenzlauerberg or New York's Williamsburg. What is the constellation of actors and agents who have activated the reuse of existing building typologies for the production and consumption of the new economy? And how do they relate a cosmopolitan history to the renaissance of Shanghai as a global city? And finally, what could be learned from these specific and localized transformation processes for future developments?

This chapter will try to unpack how Shanghai's transnational networks, cosmopolitan agents, and diasporic linkages helped expedite the reglobalization of the city after 1992, especially in the reconfiguration of the former concession areas, both physically and socio-economically. Transformations to Shanghai's existing vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods is a specific example of how these hitherto little-studied and yet crucial ‘centralities’ – one of many in the polycentric urban system serving whole regions – spatially manifest the recalibration of drivers, agents, networks, and urban forms responding to globalization's effects on local frameworks.