“Urban Loopholes”: Shanghai’s City Center Transformations since 1992

Taking cases from city center neighborhoods in Shanghai, Dr. Zhou Ying’s new book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Production in Shanghai’s City Center unpacks the urban spatial production system of the contemporary Chinese city to address what has perplexed Western publics and scholars alike. Going behind the scenes in trendy neighborhoods that appear to have emerged spontaneously, the book illustrates how in fact their redevelopment was imagined, constructed, and scripted. The constellation of actors, from the expanding global network of multilingual cosmopolites to the dialect-speaking local party officials, form the core of public-private alliances that stimulate urban redevelopment, support creative industries, and advocate heritage protection. The urban loophole, a concept that the author has developed for the mechanism that has mediated the evolving institutions of the transitional economy through spatial production, serves as a red thread through the cases to explicate the adaptive governance that expedited the appropriation of foreign know-how. These urban loopholes not only mediate between the coexistence of planned and market economies, but also balance economic efficiency with political stability, sustaining the success of what David Harvey called neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.