The Nostalgia and Modernizing Landscapes in Shanghai: Transnational elites and global-city urbanism
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Wu, Hsin-Ling
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
The main concern of this research lays on the fast changing cultural landscapes of society and life taking place in emerging global cities within our time. Through reviewing, I found the concepts which have taken over since the 90s, including the narratives about “globalization” as well as “global city” incapable of responding to the change of cultural landscape, due to its intrinsic fallacy on economic reductionism. Therefore, based on the redefinition of “transnational urbanism” proposed by Michael Peter Smith, I propose using “global-city urbanism” as new framework. Since the production and representation of new urban landscape are critical to the identification of global cities, the research will be centering on the landscape as epistemology of global-city urbanism. Additionally combining landscape studies in traditional geography and the five distinct spheres associated with global cultural flows presented by Cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai, I adopt three scapes– mediascape, consumption scape and transnational elites’ lifestyles landscape as for my analytical framework. I use this framework to achieve three objectives: firstly, to analyze the three critical agents, government, market and transnational elites, who are responsible for the shaping of global city landscape; secondly, to disentangle the message they communicate with the society with the ideoscape; and finally to seek out the intrinsic quality of Shanghai’s global-city urbanism.
In my research findings, two motifs, nostalgia and modernization, repeatedly take place in the discourse of the urban landscape making. In the process of being a global city, the nation appropriates dual discourses in order to execute social and cultural control, and moreover, to either legitimate or gloss over the social problems occurring in the economic transformation. Through active media modification, the government pictures urban images and experiences that are appealing to global capital. The architect of spectacular consumption landscape nonetheless pursues this dual track. While raising profit, it also produces “cultural capital” by using transnational elites as the model for global lifestyle and taste. Transnational elites, as agents in the city, accumulate their cultural and social capitals while they weave their everyday life, swinging between modernized space and nostalgic space. The sort of consumption taste is frequently appropriated by the market, and reified in the production of space by the real estate market. Meanwhile, the distinction of lifestyles links while also simultaneously segments urban spaces, and thus formed the fragmented quality of urban space.
In my conclusion remark, I argue that there are two intrinsic qualifies in the new urbanism of globalizing Shanghai. First of all, the dialect between nostalgia and modernization shown on the new urban landscapes in the emerging global city is, in fact, a process of construction and modification. The reproduction of “haipai wenhua” and “hsiazi pinwei” are two examples. Secondly, in a series of the exclusive spaces production, globalizing Shanghai is underneath a time-space fragmented city. Only when nation, market and transnational elites coherently adopt the two motifs for their own purposes, will the fraction seam and produce an illusion as a whole. Global-city urbanism may differ from city to city. Regardless of diverse historical and geographical contexts, they share the same characteristics, that is, nation, market and transactional elites complot the shaping of urbanism.
Subjects
上海
全球城市
生活風格
全球城市都市論
Shanghai
global city
transnational elites
lifestyles
global-city urbanism
SDGs
Type
thesis
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