Shanghai Old Town. Topography of a Phantom City. Volume 1. The Old Docks

Shanghai’s old town is a low-income, low-rise district hidden in the center of China’s wealthiest city. Houses here are crowded, the infrastructure is crude, city blocks appear run-down, and historic buildings are mostly concealed behind concrete and plywood. The streets are irregular, following the course of ancient waterways, and mostly too narrow for cars. This area used to be the preeminent seaport in China and a prosperous merchant city, surrounded by a ten-meter-high wall. After the British occupied the land outside the wall (in 1845) and the international port developed, the Chinese city slowly declined, remaining disconnected from the foreign-governed areas. Even after the wall fell, in 1912, the old town was not fully integrated into the downtown transportation grid or the treaty port economy. After 1949 the Communist government closed Shanghai to international trade. The foreign city lost the foreigners and their business, while the old city remained in a dilapidated and overcrowded limbo for forty years. The rise of state capitalism, in the 1980s, launched three decades of frantic redevelopment. All over Shanghai, repetitive concrete towers and wide roads replaced old lanes and long-standing neighborhoods. The old town was a lower priority with developers and, initially, was spared much of the blanket reconstruction. As a result, it still maintains the most varied street culture in Shanghai. The city blocks are diverse; businesses and dwellings overlap. Game parlors, repair shops, tiny restaurants and markets can occupy a single building. The neighborhoods have been shaped by years of adaptation and improvisation. Traces of Shanghai’s nine-hundred-year history are found in every section in the old city, although often obscured or ignored. Stone street signs from the Qing era are sunk in concrete walls; peeling plaster can reveal antique woodcarvings. A cluttered warehouse could be a former Taoist shrine; a crowded courtyard might once have been the mansion of a merchant prince. With a closer look, an ancient city materializes in the middle of contemporary Shanghai. This atlas is divided into two volumes: “The Old Docks” and “The Walled City.” The first volume focuses on the port area, also known as Dongjiadu, located between the city wall and the Huangpu River. This was the oldest continuously occupied site in Shanghai, the target of constant immigration and the source of the city’s prosperity.