No two Shanghais are alike. Besides being a geographical location we can point out on a map and visit, to stroll along its alleys and grand boulevards, Shanghai is so much more than this physical place of bricks and mortar. Like any other city, it is a dynamic, socially-constructed world, informed by historical and cultural practices, an enclosed place of experience or ‘a state of mind’, as Chicago sociologist Robert Park (1915) famously put it. Most of all, though, it is a mental picture that differs from mind to mind.

Crucially, Shanghai is a city in flux. In recent years, workers and machines have frantically destroyed parts of the city to build a new one as imagined and designed by policy makers, urban planners, and architects. But ‘the shape of a city changes faster than the human heart can tell’, as Baudelaire observes. Indeed, the mental maps and personal memories of Shanghai's citizens are not as easily erased. On the contrary, as Baudelaire so beautifully expresses: the new evokes the old, since the sight of a new building may bring back the memory of what used to be there in that particular spot and thereby turn it into a trope of both the passing of time and the overwhelming and destructive forces of urban renewal. Applied to Shanghai, a skyscraper designed to meet the growing demand for office property may symbolize the city's booming economy to some, while to others the sight of this very building may bring back childhood memories of the old neighbourhood it replaced, becoming a symbol of lost youth and vanishing ways of life.