Urban Scarcities: A Look at Shanghai - SCIBE

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19 URBAN SCARCITIES Figure 9: Scarcity and adaption When it comes to the city, design and planning approaches often intend to ‘provide’ people with resources that are commonly considered as ‘needed’, based on a preconceived understanding of ‘development’. Design and planning interventions are sometimes not only unnecessary or unwanted; in some cases, they take away from the ‘community’ what has evolved in response to actual want, just to provide what is believed to contribute to ‘development’—in the context of international development rightly defined as the imposition of the ‘culture of moving toward fossil-fuel (or non-renewable energy-dependent) lifestyle’ 24 . 24 Dipak Gyawali and Ajaya Dixit, ‘The Construction and Destruction of Scarcity in Development: Water and Power Experiences in Nepal’, in The Limits to Scarcity, ed. by Lyla Mehta, Science in Society (London & Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2010).
20 Deljana Iossifova Creative Cities The ‘planned city can identify, accommodate, and enable the kind of organic growth that feeds innovation and inspiration’, and that ‘creative innovation’ is something designed into ‘the vision of the master plan’, following the example of ‘existing cities such as Paris, New York, and Venice’, some argue 25 . Others claim that combating ghettos and slums—the ‘homogeneous spaces that have a high concentration of people and a low socio-economic status’ will create more problems than solutions in the long run 26 ; they see squatter cities as the ‘laboratories for innovation and adaptation’, and claim that ‘architects must be agents of active change and advocates for the users of their designs’ 27 . In this paper, I have tried to show on the example of Shanghai that the city is a system which contains both, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, and that these elements are already inherently linked to each other. If we want to understand how scarcities are generated, constructed, and perceived in the context of the built environment, it is necessary to look at the city as a system which spans across a multitude of scales and agencies. Creative reaction and adaptation to real or perceived scarcities, then, happen on different scales and influence each other, and creativity can no longer be thought as a property exclusive to the designer. In the words of Swyngedouw and Kaika: ‘Not only considerable urbanistic and architectural creativity needs to be mobilised, but also a reconsideration of the meaning of urban citizenship in terms of a multitude of identities constructed through myriad of spatially overlapping relations and networks’ 28 . 25 Stan Gale and Alfredo Brillembourg, ‘The Debate Zone: As the World Urbanizes, Will the Most Successful Cities Result from Top-down Planning or Bottom-up Innovation?’, What Matters [accessed 2 February 2011]. 26 Sandro Cattacin, ‘Why Not "Ghettos"? The Governance of Migration in the Splintering City’ . 27 Gale and Brillembourg. 28 Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, ‘The Making of 'glocal' Urban Modernities’, City, 7 (2003), 5-21 .
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Urban Scarcities: A Look at Shanghai - SCIBE

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