The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City

TLDR

Shanghai, the largest socialist industrial city in China, is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces, highlighting both local and global dimensions of urban change in post‑socialist economies. This paper provides a preliminary account of remaking Shanghai into a world city. The authors argue that inward investment, especially in real estate, combined with central government autonomy, new open‑policy windows, financial incentives, public infrastructure investment, and aggressive promotion, drives Shanghai’s urban restructuring. The study finds that while globalization has a tremendous and pervasive impact on Shanghai, it is still not on par with a truly global city, and that only through concurrent indigenous political‑economic changes can this influence be realized, resulting in an optimistic growth atmosphere and a building boom since the mid‑1990s.

Abstract

Shanghai, the largest socialist industrial city in China, is now experiencing dramatic restructuring under global and local forces. This paper provides a preliminary account of remaking this city into a world city. The case study suggests the tremendous and pervasive impact of globalisation on the city in transitional economies, although it is still not comparable with a truly global city. The growth of inward investment, particularly its penetration into real estate development, has exerted direct impacts on the urban structure. It is argued that, however, that this global influence can only be realised through the coincidence of indigenous changes in the political economy system. Specifically, the willingness of the central government to give more autonomy to local governments, the new policy to set up a window for China's open policy, the incentive for making money from selling the space, the injection of public money into infrastructure and fierce promotional development strategies, all contributed to the process of urban restructuring. The effect of combined global and local changes has led to an extremely optimistic growth atmosphere and a building boom since the mid 1990s. Shanghai highlights the local as well as the global dimensions of urban change in the post-socialist economies.