Urban Scarcities: A Look at Shanghai - SCIBE

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3 URBAN SCARCITIES availability of ‘more’, thus transforming them into a society of dutiful consumers; it has meant the transition from services and goods available to all urban residents, at least in theory, to services and goods available only to those who can afford them. On the example of a neighbourhood of Shanghai, in this paper, I will look at the ways in which residents conceive of, appropriate, handle, and adapt to scarcity in the context of the city. Figure 1: The case study area. Emerging Scarcities The splintered study neighbourhood (see Figure 1), located north of Suzhou Creek (which served during the last century as the ‘dumping ground’ for industrial facilities along its banks) in Shanghai, was inhabited by a diverse mix of people. Urban newcomers—the members of an emerging urban middle-class—resides in the brand-new, gated, and evidently affluent highrise compounds that took the place of most of a huge shantytown, or
4 Deljana Iossifova pingminqu (B). When the developer bought the land some years ago, the majority of original pingminqu residents were resettled to the outskirts of the city; by 2008, the total number of residents in the new high-rise buildings amounted to more than 6,500 people. Figure 2: ZXG in the living room of his apartment in (B). One of them, ZXG (see Figure 2), was born here in the 1950ies to poor parents from an adjacent province. He was laid-off from work in a stateowned enterprise in the early 1990ies and started his own business selling roasted chestnuts. Redevelopment of his neighbourhood resulted in the demolition of his family home, but his chestnut enterprise had put him in the favourable (and exceptional) position of being able to buy a groundfloor apartment in the gated commercial development that would be built in the old neighbourhood’s place. Since then, he insisted, ‘the neighbourhood has changed for the better’—not only had his living conditions largely
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Urban Scarcities: A Look at Shanghai - SCIBE

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