Download or read book The Shanghai Alleyway House written by Gregory Bracken and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a nineteenth-century commercial development, the alleyway house was a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house and the Western terraced one. Unique to Shanghai, the alleyway house was a space where the blurring of the boundaries of public and private life created a vibrant social community. In recent years however, the city’s rapid redevelopment has meant that the alleyway house is being destroyed, and this book seeks to understand it in terms of the lifestyle it engendered for those who called it home, whilst also looking to the future of the alleyway house. Based on groundwork research, this book examines the Shanghai alleyway house in light of the complex history of the city, especially during the colonial era. It also explores the history of urban form (and governance) in China in order to question how the Eastern and Western traditions combined in Shanghai to produce a unique and dynamic housing typology. Construction techniques and different alleyway house sub-genres are also examined, as is the way of life they engendered, including some of the side-effects of alleyway house life, such as the literature it inspired, both foreign and local, as well as the portrayal of life in the laneways as seen in films set in the city. The book ends by posing the question: what next for the alleyway house? Does it even have a future, and if so, what lies ahead for this rapidly vanishing typology? This interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese studies, architecture and urban development, as well as history and literature.
Download or read book Shanghai Homes written by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
Download or read book Popular Magazines and Fiction in Shanghai 1914 1925 written by Peijie Mao and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers, which were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and the notions of ideal womanhood and the new family, were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society” and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.
Download or read book Beyond the Neon Lights written by Hanchao Lu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.
Download or read book Aspects of Urbanization in China written by Gregory Bracken and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's opkomst als wereldmacht is een van de ingrijpendste gebeurtenissen van deze tijd. Honderden miljoenen mensen zijn de armoede ontvlucht dankzij de snelle industrialisatie van het land. De wonderbaarlijke economische groei van China heeft zijn nadelen, iets wat vaak het meest pijnlijk duidelijk wordt in de steden. Deze studie is geschreven door wetenschappers uit verschillende disciplines, waaronder architectuur, stedenbouw, sociale wetenschappen, aardrijkskunde en antrolpologie. Een dee van de auteurs behandelt de mondiale ambities van de steden, terwijl andere hun culturele en architecturale uitingen onderzoeken.
Download or read book Street of Eternal Happiness written by Rob Schmitz and published by Crown. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable portrait of individuals who hope, struggle, and grow along a single street cutting through the heart of Shanghai, from one of the most acclaimed broadcast journalists reporting on China. Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city’s sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies. There’s Zhao, whose path from factory floor to shopkeeper is sidetracked by her desperate measures to ensure a better future for her sons. Down the street lives Auntie Fu, a fervent capitalist forever trying to improve herself with religion and get-rich-quick schemes while keeping her skeptical husband at bay. Up a flight of stairs, musician and café owner CK sets up shop to attract young dreamers like himself, but learns he’s searching for something more. As Schmitz becomes more involved in their lives, he makes surprising discoveries which untangle the complexities of modern China: A mysterious box of letters that serve as a portal to a family’s—and country’s—dark past, and an abandoned neighborhood where fates have been violently altered by unchecked power and greed. A tale of 21st-century China, Street of Eternal Happiness profiles China’s distinct generations through multifaceted characters who illuminate an enlightening, humorous, and at times heartrending journey along the winding road to the Chinese Dream. Each story adds another layer of humanity and texture to modern China, a tapestry also woven with Schmitz’s insight as a foreign correspondent. The result is an intimate and surprising portrait that dispenses with the tired stereotypes of a country we think we know, immersing us instead in the vivid stories of the people who make up one of the world’s most captivating cities.
Download or read book Building Shanghai written by Edward Denison and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai's illustrious history and phenomenal future is celebrated in this book, which examines the evolution of the city's architecture and urban form in order to contextualise the challenges facing the city today. The physical legacies that reflect Shanghai's uniqueness historically and contemporarily are examined chronologically using specific case studies of exemplary architecture interwoven in a compelling narrative that unlocks the many mysteries surrounding this amazing metropolis. Some of the most influential colonial architecture in the world, outstanding examples of Modernism and Art Deco, and an exceptional selection of eclectic and vernacular architecture reflecting Shanghai's many adopted cultures are revealed. This is the first book ever to examine this remarkable subject in a manner that is both comprehensive and captivating in its written content and stunningly illustrated with over 300 archive and contemporary photographs and maps.
Download or read book Detecting Chinese Modernities written by Yan Wei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Detecting Chinese Modernities: Rupture and Continuity in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1896–1949), Yan Wei historicizes the two stages in the development of Chinese detective fiction and discusses the rupture and continuity in the cultural transactions, mediation, and appropriation that occurred when the genre of detective fiction traveled to China during the first half of the twentieth century. Wei identifies two divergent, or even opposite strategies for appropriating Western detective fiction during the late Qing and the Republican periods. She further argues that these two periods in the domestication of detective fiction were also connected by shared emotions. Both periods expressed ambivalent and sometimes contradictory views regarding Chinese tradition and Western modernity.
Download or read book Creating Chinese Urbanism written by Fulong Wu and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creating Chinese Urbanism describes the landscape of urbanisation in China, revealing the profound impacts of marketisation on Chinese society and the consequential governance changes at the grassroots level. During the imperial and socialist periods, state and society were embedded. However, as China has been becoming urban, the territorial foundation of ‘earth-bound’ society has been dismantled. This metaphorically started an urban revolution, which has transformed the social order derived from the ‘state in society’. The state has thus become more visible in Chinese urban life. Besides witnessing the breaking down of socially integrated neighbourhoods, Fulong Wu explains the urban roots of a rising state in China. Instead of governing through autonomous stakeholders, state-sponsored strategic intentions remain. In the urban realm, the desire for greater residential privacy does not foster collectivism. State-led rebuilding of residential communities has sped up the demise of traditionalism and given birth to a new China with greater urbanism and state-centred governance. Taking the vantage point of concrete residential neighbourhoods, Creating Chinese Urbanism offers a cutting-edge analysis of how China is becoming urban and grounds the changing state governance in the process of urbanization. Its original and material interpretation of the changing role of the state in China makes it suitable reading for researchers and students in the fields of urban studies, geography, planning and the built environment.
Download or read book Dwelling in the World written by Elizabeth LaCouture and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women’s magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.
Download or read book Silencing Shanghai written by Fang Xu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silencing Shanghai investigates the paradoxical and counterintuitive contrast between Shanghai’s emergence as a global city and the marginalization of its native population, captured through the rapid decline of the distinctive Shanghai dialect. From this unique vantage point, Fang Xu tells a story of power relations in a cosmopolitan metropolis closely monitored and shaped by an authoritarian state through policies affecting urban redevelopment, internal migration, and language. These state policies favor the rich, the resourceful, and the highly educated, while alienate the poorer and less educated Shanghainese geographically and linguistically. When the state vigorously promotes Mandarin Chinese through legal and administrative means, Shanghainese made the conscious yet reluctant choice of shifting from the dialect to the national language. At the same time, millions of migrants have little incentive to adopt the vernacular given that their relation to the state has already firmly established their legal, financial, and social standing in the city. The recent shift in the urban linguistic scene that silences the Shanghai dialect is ultimately part of the state-led global city-building process. Through the association of the use of national language with realizing the "China Dream," the state further eliminates the unique vernacular characters of Shanghai.
Download or read book Shanghai Faithful written by Jennifer Lin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the next decade, China could be home to more Christians than any country in the world. Through the 150-year saga of a single family, this book vividly dramatizes the remarkable religious evolution of the world’s most populous nation. Shanghai Faithful is both a touching family memoir and a chronicle of the astonishing spread of Christianity in China. Five generations of the Lin family—buffeted by history’s crosscurrents and personal strife—bring to life an epoch that is still unfolding. A compelling cast—a poor fisherman, a doctor who treated opium addicts, an Ivy League–educated priest, and the charismatic preacher Watchman Nee—sets the book in motion. Veteran journalist Jennifer Lin takes readers from remote nineteenth-century mission outposts to the thriving house churches and cathedrals of today’s China. The Lin family—and the book’s central figure, the Reverend Lin Pu-chi—offer witness to China’s tumultuous past, up to and beyond the betrayals and madness of the Cultural Revolution, when the family’s resolute faith led to years of suffering. Forgiveness and redemption bring the story full circle. With its sweep of history and the intimacy of long-hidden family stories, Shanghai Faithful offers a fresh look at Christianity in China—past, present, and future.
Download or read book Shanghai Gone written by Qin Shao and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the best accounts of the reality of gentrification and urban development in China . . . grounded with solid historical, ethnographic and legal evidence” (Urban Studies). In recent decades, the centuries-old city of Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity. With its world famous skyscrapers, it now ranks with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao applies the concept of domicide—the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers—to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns that made way for the new Shanghai. Shao gives voice to the holdouts and protesters who resisted domicide and demanded justice. She follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China’s reform era, Shao vividly portrays the corrupt and rapacious pursuit of growth and profit, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.
Download or read book Housing Inequality in Chinese Cities written by Youqin Huang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, Chinese cities have experienced profound social, economic and spatial transformations. In particular, Chinese cities have witnessed the largest housing boom in history and unprecedented housing privatization. China now is a country of homeowners, with more than 70 per cent of urban residents owning homes, higher than many developed countries. This book shows how China’s spectacular housing success is not shared by all social groups, with rapidly rising housing inequality, and residential segregation increasingly prevalent in previously homogeneous Chinese cities. It focuses on the two extremes of the residential landscape, and reveals the stark contrast between low-income households who live in shacks in so-called ‘urban villages’ and the nouveaux riches who live in exclusive gated villa communities. Over four parts, the contributors look at the degree to which inequality affects Chinese cities, and the extent of residential differentiation; housing for the urban poor, and in particular, housing for migrants from rural China; housing for the rapidly expanding Chinese middle class and the new rich; and finally, governance in residential neighbourhoods. Housing Inequality in Chinese Cities presents theoretically informed and empirically grounded research into the polarized residential landscape in Chinese cities, and as such will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, urban geography, urban sociology, and urban studies.
Download or read book Protest and Resistance in the Tourist City written by Claire Colomb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the globe, from established tourist destinations such as Venice or Prague to less traditional destinations in both the global North and South, there is mounting evidence that points to an increasing politicization of the topic of urban tourism. In some cities, residents and other stakeholders take issue with the growth of tourism as such, as well as the negative impacts it has on their cities; while in others, particular forms and effects of tourism are contested or deplored. In numerous settings, contestations revolve less around tourism itself than around broader processes, policies and forces of urban change perceived to threaten the right to ‘stay put’, the quality of life or identity of existing urban populations. This book for the first time looks at urban tourism as a source of contention and dispute and analyses what type of conflicts and contestations have emerged around urban tourism in 16 cities across Europe, North America, South America and Asia. It explores the various ways in which community groups, residents and other actors have responded to – and challenged – tourism development in an international and multi-disciplinary perspective. The title links the largely discrete yet interconnected disciplines of ‘urban studies’ and ‘tourism studies’ and draws on approaches and debates from urban sociology; urban policy and politics; urban geography; urban anthropology; cultural studies; urban design and planning; tourism studies and tourism management. This ground breaking volume offers new insight into the conflicts and struggles generated by urban tourism and will be of interest to students, researchers and academics from the fields of tourism, geography, planning, urban studies, development studies, anthropology, politics and sociology.
Download or read book Dynamics of Community Formation written by Robert W. Compton, Jr. and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary work discusses the construction, maintenance, evolution, and destruction of home and community spaces, which are central to the development of social cohesion. By examining how people throughout the world form different communities to establish a sense of home, the volume surveys the formation of identity within the context of rapid development, global and domestic neoliberal and political governmental policies, and various societal pressures. The themes of cooperation, conflict, inclusion, exclusion, and balance require negotiation between different actors (e.g., the state, professional developers, social activists, and residents) as homes and communities develop.
Download or read book Nail Houses Or The Destruction of Lower Shanghai written by Peter Bialobrzeski and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During his travels through China, Peter Bialobrzeski was fascinated by the so-called nail houses. Surrounded by tall, newly constructed buildings, these houses have been earmarked for demolition, but their owners resolutely refuse to vacate. In his thought-provoking series the artist photographs these isolated structures, often in the evening hours, when the brightly lit interiors convey the domestic comfort that these homes provide for their owners, despite all the cracks in the walls. Peter Bialobrzeski (* 1961 in Wolfsburg) uses his camera to offer these renitent structures moral support. Following the publication of Case Study Homes and Informal Arrangements, this striking series completing the Habitat trilogy poses uncomfortable questions to the viewer. It also emphatically underscores the fundamental right of every human being to a home and sense of security.
