Politics and the social in world-class cities: Building a Shanghai model

Abstract

The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai provided a unique opportunity to examine emerging visions of utopian urbanism in the Global South, and the contradictions contained within them. The theme of the event was ‘Better City, Better Life’, and in its own promotional literature the Shanghai World Expo Coordinating Committee stressed the importance of sustainable, harmonious cities. The Expo was seen by many proponents as a way to educate the public about the opportunities and challenges cities face, and to identify and demonstrate solutions that harnessed the dynamism of urban space. At the same time, the Expo was itself a massive undertaking of urban redevelopment that dramatically reshaped parts of the downtown landscape and beyond. The aim of this article is to examine the vision of the World Expo that its proponents put forth, and to explore both inherent and extrinsic tensions between this vision and the trajectory of urban development.

Keywords

Shanghai transformation urban development urban space World Expo

It is the most lasting puzzle in the history of urban development as to how poverty-ridden areas can be eliminated from the social map of the city… Directed by the goal of sustainable development, community remodeling in the city of the 21st century will entail the creation of balanced communities, and the reduction or even elimination of gray or dark corners in the city.

International Expositions Bureau (2005: 41–42)

Introduction

In May of 2010, the Chinese journalist Gao Yubing explained to readers of the New York Times a controversy over a Shanghai custom of wearing pyjamas in public. The context was the recently launched World Expo, which would run from 1 May to 31 October. City and Expo officials had decided that the practice, rooted in China’s ‘opening up’ to the West in the 1970s, needed to end before the global media spotlight and foreign tourists descended upon the city. Yubing explained that in the run up to the Expo volunteer ‘pyjama police’ had been dispatched to patrol working-class neighbourhoods, where the sight of elderly couples out for an evening stroll in matching pyjamas is not uncommon. Signs had also cropped up encouraging residents to be ‘civilised’ for the Expo and wear their sleep attire indoors only (Yubing, 2010).

The policing of sleepwear in public was not an isolated incident. In the run up to the Expo, the city had rolled out a robust campaign to redesign the look and feel of select public spaces, through an ‘Action Plan to Promote Civilized Behavior to Welcome Expo 2010’ (Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, 2006) and the ‘World Expo Civilization Compact’ (Dynon, 2011). Officials also introduced similar campaigns in Beijing and Guangzhou, prior to the Olympic and Asian Games, respectively (Shin, 2012). China is far from unique here, and we can observe similar efforts across the globe. Controversy emerged in Brazil more recently, for example, when the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Sergio Cabral, introduced the ‘Law of Morality and Good Manners’ prior to the 2014 World Cup (Vasconcellos, 2013). Seen in this light, the Expo is just one of many new efforts in so-called emerging world-class cities to shape ‘the ways in which urban space is inhabited’ (Dreyer, 2012: 48).

These attempts to remould the city – or certain parts of it, at least – and its inhabitants form part of a broader process of urban transformation that has variously been linked to neoliberalism and market reforms, as well as to certain conceptions of cosmopolitan modernity associated with globalisation. Although the implementation of these efforts is highly uneven across cities as well as within them, generally speaking they consist of both destructive and creative moments, of clearing the old to make way for the new. They are also guided by a particular vision of the city and city life with the power to influence all aspects of what is meant by the urban, from the built environment to the institutions and methods of governance, to the appropriate conduct of the citizen-inhabitant. Essential to this vision is an ejection from the city of social conflict and regulation of the social relations which underpin them.

In this article I examine how we might think about the social in world-class spaces carved out of the broader urban landscape. I also consider what the reconstitution of the social in these transforming spaces may mean for urban politics, and for citizenship more specifically.¹ I use the occasion of the World Expo to examine a return of a particular iteration of the social that elides the relationships through which inequality is produced and resisted, and that employs the social, simultaneously, as a mechanism of production and regulation. I am especially interested in the concepts of belonging, inclusion and civic engagement, which are central to how we conceive of citizenship (Samara, 2012). My focus here in not on the discord and resistance this process of remaking cities and reshaping inhabitants generates but on the attempts to narrate an urban future in which these are peripheral. These efforts may be important for many reasons, but perhaps above all for furthering the collective effort of delineating the political spaces of the city in such a way as to subvert their potential for democratic practice (Madden, 2012).

My approach is to examine official English language Expo documents produced by local government and Expo authorities. The use of English language sources is important for understanding how the Expo was used to represent an ideal urban future to an elite global audience of policy makers, governmental and non-governmental bodies, and civil society. While this study does not review all of the documents made available before and during the Expo, it does examine the major English language publications, and this review was supplemented with a survey of Expo press releases, official news stories and the Expo magazine. Themes were fairly consistent across media and for the most part offered a relatively superficial discussion of urban themes. What makes them interesting, however, is the vision they offer for an urban future in which cities play a central role in human progress. For a time, these documents were available online, and some still are, but most of the official websites associated with the Expo have gone dormant and exist primarily as relics.

The Expo is an important case study because it was explicitly organised around the theme of Better City Better Life, and its promotional literature, as well as many of its exhibits, were used to propagate a vision of the ideal city. Many Expo documents and official pronouncements about the event, as well as event exhibits themselves, directly addressed urban challenges, potential solutions, and the question of how cities should function. While most of the attention, tellingly, fell on technical innovations and carefully avoided overtly political themes, Expo documents did on occasion speak to questions of inequality, urban governance, inclusion and, significantly, the role of urban inhabitants. Some documents incorporated, and cited, the progressive language of UN Habitat and other more critical perspectives on urbanisation, particularly in the Global South.

The World Expo in Shanghai, organised around principles of progressive urbanism, presents a unique opportunity to examine the process of urban imagining. The city has long seen itself as a centre of Chinese urban modernity and the Expo gave the city a chance to signal to a global audience what this can and will mean for Shanghai (Russo, 2009). Shanghai has also come to serve as a model of sorts for cities in the South (Chattaraj, 2012), providing a powerful reference point for one vision of the urban future. It may be that the primary concern for local officials is to build Shanghai as an economic power, but we should be cautious in assuming that its visions of cosmopolitanism can be neatly folded into these imperatives (Shilbach, 2010). Finally, Shanghai may not be a representative city, but it is an iconic one, and in better understanding the way it represented itself through the World Expo we may gain valuable insight into much broader urban trends and the forces that drive them.

I am particularly interested in how Expo authorities balanced, and attempted to merge, the political agenda of the state, the demands of market-driven urban redevelopment, and the cosmopolitanism associated with world-class urbanism (McDonald, 2007; Roy and Ong, 2011). The questions that drive the inquiry are: how is the social reconstructed in the techno-utopian vision offered by the World Expo (Madden, 2012)? More specifically, what is the idiom (Roy, 2009) of conflict/harmony that this construction offers in an era in which, by most measures, inequality and conflict are, and will likely remain, constitutive features of the urban landscape? What kind of politics does it suggest and what role for the citizen-inhabitant? This is admittedly a modest inquiry, in that much of the terrain of the social exists outside of world-class spaces. Further, my aim here is to outline an emerging ideal type, and not to engage the more complicated question of the many ways the social is constructed and contested even in affluent enclaves. The value of this limited engagement lies in understanding the emergence of a vision of urban conflict and change through which problems and their solutions are represented and, in turn, translated into policy and practice.

The social and the city

As the editors of this important special issue on the social in Chinese cities point out, although the scholarship on Chinese urbanisation devotes significant attention to the roles of market and state, less has been given to society. This is not entirely surprising, and may in part reflect a general tendency to downplay the significance of the social by those who govern, and by those who speak the language of those who govern. By social I mean the world of everyday life and interaction, the relationships which underpin social reproduction and struggles for social security, and the policies and practices associated with these. By extension, the social is central to the conflicts that emerge between individuals and between groups around these processes, whereas the problem of the social refers to how these can/should be managed (Brodie, 2008). The social, being fundamentally unruly, if not ultimately ungovernable, can serve as the raw material for struggles by dispossessed groups against the forces that seek to push them to the margins, and serve as the site at which they discuss, debate and articulate their needs, desires and demands. The question of the social is, therefore, intimately bound up with ongoing debates focused on inequality, inhabitance, and the right to the city that have been generated by hardening urban divisions across the Global South (Samara et al., 2013a).

The social as an object of analysis first emerged in the context of social conflict and political unrest during the 19th century (Brodie, 2008). Its emergence drew attention to sharp inequalities linked to widespread and sustained failings by the state and by the market in the early industrial period, and led to an era of social reform based on a central role for the state in ensuring the general welfare and maintaining a minimum peace between labour and capital (Brodie, 2008; Marshall, 1950). It is not difficult to understand why urban policy makers and administrators in China (and beyond), who are also faced with deep inequalities but, at the same time, remain committed to a more austere socio-economic regime, are reluctant to shine too much light on the social. As tensions build and political unrest spreads, however, ignoring the social becomes less and less of an option.

A full understanding of the changes many cities are undergoing at present demands that we appreciate the spatial dimensions of social inequality and the social dimensions of spatial inequality as cities are split along both axes. For example, while in Shanghai the move to less central areas has meant improved housing for some of the displaced, it tends to disproportionately and negatively impact lower income and marginal populations (Day and Cervero, 2010). In newly redeveloped zones, on the other hand, we observe increasingly exclusive spaces organised around various forms of consumption, leisure and creative revenue generation (He, 2007; Wang, 2011; Zheng, 2010). These sorting processes should be read, at least in part, as processes of disentangling complex social ties through spatial strategies that facilitate governance, on the one hand, and give expression to the demands from more affluent groups for spatial distance to match increasing social distance between socio-economic groups, on the other (Samara et al., 2013b). It would be difficult to make sense of the emerging politics within emerging affluent spaces without understanding these dynamics of socio-spatial separation.

It is because of this disentangling that we must turn our attention to the social in the city and to the question of why, in the current period of market-driven, state-supported urban inequality, the social again becomes both an object of concern and a contested terrain. The present study contributes to this inquiry by beginning to identify the new social architecture being constructed in world-class spaces, and how it can act as a mechanism of regulation within these spaces through, in part, the production of new citizen-subjects. The analysis here builds upon work examining the processes of social dislocation that accompany the creation of well-guarded world-class enclaves, primarily through evictions and relocation but also through more lasting processes of governance that operate in particular places and through institutions of social governance (Shin, 2012).

Whether or not the social permanently exited the stage of history in the wake of neoliberal ascendancy or simply shed one form for another remains a matter for debate (Dean, 2010; Rose, 1996). My position here is that there has been an important convergence of the social and the urban, one that involves a rescaling of the social as the social welfare state withers and non-state, particularly market actors, become more robust. The social and spatial division of cities occurring across the globe is, in part, a response to this rescaling: an effort to govern the social and, importantly, prevent its disruptive powers from derailing urban-based finance regimes (Harvey, 1985; Sassen, 1991). Despite these efforts, the social has reemerged as a central political question precisely because of the vacuum created by the demolition of the social welfare state, and as the consequences of its collapse ripple throughout the population (Gerometta et al., 2005; Roth, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2005). In this context, not only social welfare but also social conflict emerge as primary challenges to economic growth and prosperity, on the one hand, and to social regulation, on the other. This is of particular significance in China, as its elite embrace state capitalism and the nation is reshaped by sharp and rapid socio-economic division at regional and urban scales. What we see in new world-class spaces, and articulated in the vision of ‘Better City, Better Life’ offered by the World Expo, is an elite-driven project to channel these unruly forces, to regulate the social through engagement with it, and to alter ‘the nature of the social contract itself’ (Dreyer, 2012: 48).

This new dynamic of the social in the city and the explicit engagement with urban social problems by the Expo and other elite discourses are of significance to the wide-ranging debates on the right to the city and the role of inhabitants in the production of urban space (Harvey, 2008; Purcell, 2002). In earlier work, I argue that the social is an essential site for addressing a crisis of citizenship and for grounding a politics of right to the city (Samara, 2012). Efforts to produce world-class spaces in cities with high levels of inequality and massive poverty represent an important front in these struggles. Though much has been written about the relationship between these spaces and the urban world ‘outside’, we are still in the early stages of examining politics in world-class spaces themselves and their role in the making of the broader urban fabric. Critics may point to these spaces as gilded enclaves, shielded from a much vaster world of poverty and deprivation in the urban periphery, but for proponents they are a whole new urban world in miniature, a nucleus that, with the right mix of entrepreneurial spirit, technological innovation and targeted investment, will metastasize across the body of the city.

Changes in the concept of citizenship track with and are tied to changes in the social described above. The reconfiguration and rescaling of citizenship has advanced through an increasing tendency for citizenship to be articulated as privilege in the face of urbanisation and a relatively rapid demographic shift (Zhang, 2001a). This gives rise to conflicting and competing versions of citizenship, rooted in the tensions and turmoil generated by inequality, and in many cases paralleling the emergence or expansion of social and spatial divisions (Holston, 2008). Civil society is increasingly absorbed by the privatised and quasi-privatised sphere, becoming a new and exclusive polity of sorts, bounded by market rationalities and state interests, and articulated through a language of cosmopolitanism. The citizen-subject produced in these spaces embodies a world-class aesthetic (Ghertner, 2011) and exists at some social, and often spatial, distance from the people of the urban peripheries.

We arrive, then, at the question of rights, of access to the power to shape the urban world, and how these are conceived of in relation to these new polities and new citizens. The reanimation of citizenship and the social in these redeveloped cosmopolitan spaces is not framed within the context of society or social relationships but, following the literature on neoliberalism and governance, on the individual (Peck and Tickell, 2007; Rose, 1996; Vanwynsberghe et al., 2013). The individual sets the horizon of politics, and agency is framed within practices of consumption, adaptation and progress through innovations in technology and ideas, rather than in transformations in social relations, relations of production and relations of power. Consequently, world-class spaces seem to encourage modes of conduct that obscure politics rooted in the social, as traditionally understood, and to reward citizen-subjects who practice a different politics enacted through a series of elisions, rooted in a different conception of the social. The emerging rights-agency framework is not oriented towards confronting deep social divisions, and the thick social relationships that generate them, but toward an obligation to sustain the world as it is encountered.

Building a better city

The relationship between the utopian visions of city builders in Shanghai and the transformation of the built environment in preparation for the Expo found expression in the event’s well-known theme, Better City, Better Life. Here the event itself, the construction and reconfiguration of the city in preparation for it, and the legacy of urban development these would collectively leave behind, were intimately bound together in the conjuring of Shanghai’s future. While promises of positive and lasting transformation are not new to mega-event promotions, making these claims as boldly as Shanghai’s leaders did, and with such fanfare, only underscored how central the Expo was to the grand schemes of reshaping, and signalling the future of, the inner city and beyond, as the city promoted and pursued a vision of harmonic urbanism.

The 2010 World Expo was conceived of by its proponents in government as central to city branding efforts (Nie and Lu, 2010). This branding effort was explicitly aimed at both local and global audiences (Cull, 2012; Dynon, 2011; Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, 2006). The Shanghai 2010 World Expo Organizing Committee was aggressive from the start in positioning the Expo’s theme as the core message in its strategic communications plan (Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination, 2005a; Shanghai 2010 World Expo Organizing Committee, 2007: 6). There was a high level of repetition of message across Expo literature, with repeated use of similar and occasionally identical language in official city documents and those prepared in collaboration with the International Bureau of Expositions, the organising body of the World Expo. From the start, branding was infused with a certain vision of cosmopolitanism, rooted in the well-worn modernist mythology of linear progress, that city officials and other boosters viewed as ‘a means to promote the comprehensive development of the city’ (Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, 2006: 225; Zhu and Rogers, 2006). Further, Expo officials hoped transformation of the inner city would also serve as a model for downtown revitalisation beyond China (Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, 2006: 229).

The meta-theme of the Expo paired the emergence of homo urbanas with the idea of the city as an agent in making life better (Bureau of Shanghai, n.d.). In oft-repeated references to Lewis Mumford, promotional Expo literature pointed to the city as an expression of human civilisation and a site for the improvement of the human condition (Bureau of Shanghai, 2005b). Beyond this, the specific elements of the theme were:

Blending of Diverse Cultures in the City

Economic Prosperity in the City

Innovation of Science and Technology in the City

Remodelling of Communities in the City

Interactions Between Urban and Rural Areas

Through the theme, the Expo sought to raise three questions:

What kind of city makes life better?

What kind of life makes cities better?

What kind of urban development makes the Earth a better home for mankind and all its inhabitants? (Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination, n.d.)

And, finally, organisers identified four goals that the Expo would seek to meet through its thematic focus:

identify challenges and solutions in the urban age

facilitate heritage preservation and promote healthy urban development

identify and disseminate models of sustainable urban development for developing countries

deepen understanding within human society (Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination, n.d.).

Expo organisers did not shy away from identifying clear and very real challenges for cities and their inhabitants, if mostly in very general terms. Among those they identify in one document are basic needs and rights, equal opportunity, public space for interaction and public participation in urban governance (Bureau of Shanghai, n.d.: 15). In another, these challenges are defined as ‘spatial conflicts, cultural collisions, resources shortage and environmental degeneration’ (Bureau of Shanghai, 2005b). Expo organisers positioned the event in the context of both human rights and urban rights as expressed by the United Nations. Citing the Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements, issued during the UN Conference on Human Settlements, the Expo Committee and IEB (International Expositions Bureau) stated:

All the problems facing the city, including congestion, pollution, crime and conflicts, are believed to originate in discords between man and nature, between man and man, and between spiritual and material lives. It is also maintained that such discords, if left unattended, will inevitably lead to the decline of life quality in cities and even the degeneration of human civilization. It is in face of such discords that Expo 2010 Shanghai China proposes the concept of ‘City of Harmony’ as a response to the appeal for ‘Better City, Better Life’. (International Expositions Bureau, 2005: 38)

The concept of the harmonious city is repeated throughout Expo branding literature (Dynon, 2011). In a document prepared post-event, with the input of the United Nations and the IEB, Shanghai officials again state that ‘we aspire to build cities that establish harmony between diverse people, between development and environment, between cultural legacies and future innovations’ (Shanghai Manual, 2012). The audience for this particular message is primarily domestic and intended to reconcile aspects of the Expo theme related to progressive cosmopolitanism with one-party rule and market-oriented reforms (Dou, 2009, cited in Dynon, 2011). The emphasis on the harmonious city in a context of increasing inequality represents, according to Shin, an attempt to create a unified social space and ‘to pacify social and political discontents rising out of economic inequalities, religious and ethnic tensions, and urban–rural divide’ (Hatherley, 2010; Shin, 2012: 729).

The emphasis on the harmonious city becomes a way to at once elide and narrate inequality and contestation; it becomes a proxy for the social, but one in which conflict is due largely to interpersonal and intercultural relations, rather than to fundamentally unjust social relations. Harmony between diverse people, which appears in discussion of different groups ‘blending’ in the city, is really the only explicit mention of social conflict in any sustained way, and is framed as an issue of cultural diversity, not inequality. Indeed, in a post-event document, the 300-page Shanghai Manual, urban unrest in Los Angeles and Paris is attributed to ethnic and racial conflicts related to tolerance, with no mention of economic inequality and social marginalisation (Shanghai Manual, 2012: 265).² The Manual contains no mention of inequality, evictions or housing demolition – all major sources of conflict throughout the world, and certainly in the run up to the Expo – though there are brief mentions of relocation and the importance of tenure security. This broad framing suggests an approach to agency that is rooted in the principle of adaptation to a world shaped by others, to the smoothing of difference, and leaves little room for politics in the even more liberal versions of the democratic tradition. Indeed, as we will see below, although there is a place for resident participation in city governance, it is quite limited and does not figure centrally in the production of urban space itself.

Making good citizens

In the context of emerging world-class spaces, vulnerable populations are often physically removed from redeveloped spaces and the spaces themselves change in ways that reinforce exclusivity, but also belonging. Thus, redevelopment is not only economic in nature, it often also builds notions of order and belonging into the environment (Dikec, 2002; Merry, 2001; Samara, 2010; Zhang L, 2001b). Governance of these spaces, including defining who belongs, does not simply follow a strict economic logic linked to consumption, but also involves what Ghertner calls rule by a world-class aesthetic (Ghertner, 2011). The displacement of potentially unruly populations represents one aspect of this rule, while the implementation and enforcement of a code of appropriate behaviour is another. In the end, world-class aesthetics become deeply intertwined with new built environments and the subjects for whom they are intended; exclusion from these spaces is not absolute, but belonging is conditional.

In the Expo vision, conflict and difference are rearticulated in ways that minimise disruption of order and encourage harmony. The social is redefined in closed terms that exclude the actual social relationships through which inhabitants could disrupt existing urban spaces and produce new ones. It is a vision of the social that brings isolated individuals together as individuals (Debord, 1967: 116, cited in Shin, 2012: 731), while still claiming an interest and investment in society as a reference point for human progress. Thus, we are not presented with a denial of the social as much as with the distillation of its least volatile elements and their incorporation into spaces that have already been ordered by the will and power of others. It is not only new built environments that emerge but also new social environments and new citizen-subjects.

The right kind of citizen in the case of the Expo vision introduces an innovation in the construction of the social. When it returns, it is in the form of ‘man’, distinct from, yet organically linked to ‘the city’: ‘Man is the cell of a city, and also its soul. It is man who gives city its culture, character and innovative power’ (Bureau of Shanghai, n.d.: 11). Homo urbanas as imagined here is included in world city spaces under certain conditions which, if not always explicitly stated, reveal themselves through a range of disciplinary actions and filtering processes, in regulations that define and enforce civilised behaviour, for example, as well as by virtue of the kinds of commercial, public and private spaces which emerge in redeveloped inner city zones. World-class aesthetics may suggest certain forms of civilised behaviour, but more importantly they ground a common sense understanding of belonging. The relationship between ‘man’ and ‘man’ – the elementary relationship of the social – is mediated by relationship of ‘man’ to the space itself, and the social is reconstituted through this relationship, through the commitment to/investment in this space.

Belonging and participation emerge as two central motifs in Expo literature that elaborate the social role of the atomised inhabitant in these spaces. These refer not only to the ability to enter into and move about these spaces – though for some there are very real barriers to even this – or to fully participate as consumers, but also to a mode of inclusion. From the outset inclusion, and by extension participation, is predicated on ‘civilised’ behaviour as captured and regulated by the various compacts and regulations issued by the authorities and draped on banners around the city. Civilised behaviour acts as a mechanism for producing and regulating subjects in the mould of a world-class aesthetic, but it is not only the literal endorsement and sanctioning of specific actions that matter here – and these do matter. Through this regulation of behaviour the boundaries that distinguish belonging from transgression are defined, and ‘civilised’ behaviour, including items such as not littering and standing in line at the Expo for example, is encouraged (Dynon, 2011). Through this regulation of the relationship of the individual to the space, through an accommodation of behaviour to its norms and attention to its care, social bonds are formed that can inform collective action.

Inclusion and participation are common currency in good urban governance discourse and appear frequently there as core ideals for progressive city planning and development more broadly. Expo literature does contain some references to participation in urban governance and planning as a principle (Shanghai Manual, 2012: 15) but these refer to consultation rather than any real decision-making when they are mentioned with any specificity. The Shanghai Declaration, for example, states:

Urban governments need established mechanisms that enable communities and businesses to make suggestions and receive responses. These include opportunities to participate in public debates on the future planning of their cities and their regions … urban leaders should encourage and support the active involvement of civil society organizations representing relevant groups in order to increase the effectiveness of policies aimed at improving the lives of urban dwellers, particularly the poor or those living in slums. (Shanghai Declaration, 2010. Emphasis added)

Within the broader thematic sweep of the Expo, however, inclusion and participation are narrowly conceived, reserving for the inhabitant a passive role in the process of city making. As Madden observed in his own review, ‘[I]n all of the materials on city planning and urban design nowhere was anything mentioned that resembled democracy or participatory politics’ (Madden, 2012). In specific references to how citizens should be involved in the Expo itself, inhabitants provide bodies and play the role of city boosters. Participation is defined as attendance at public events (Bureau of Shanghai, 2007) and from the beginning Expo organisers promoted a form of civic engagement that conceives of civics as an extension of place marketing, as opposed to place making (Bureau of Shanghai, 2006; Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission, 2006: 227–228). Citizens are invited to take part in the event but not in its planning, and participation is reduced to the celebration of already made spaces. This promotion of the Shanghai brand through everyday behaviour is shaped by notions of civilised behaviour and practices of consumption, but also in embracing a civic identity, a public identity, that embodies world-class spaces. Inhabitants are included but in world-class spaces produced by others, their participation relegated to collective boosterism, their social power channelled toward maximising the economic prosperity of the city, as well as its image – which their behaviour embodies. There is a distinct absence of any role for citizens in making policy. Indeed, the single exception I could find is a passing reference to participatory budgeting as discussed by the Asian Development Bank in 2008 (Shanghai Manual, 2012: Chapter 1, p.5).

Inhabitants of these spaces, as they are represented in the vision of a better city and better life, exercise agency through their role as drivers of world-class, high tech and creative industries. The city is, in Expo literature, ‘an incubator of human innovation and creation’ and fostering these traits is seen as a vital project in building better cities (Bureau of Shanghai, n.d.: 11). The expression of these traits, however, is mentioned predominantly in the context of entrepreneurship, science and technology, and the development of creative industries within the ‘knowledge economy’. ‘Social’ relationships are reconstituted as the creative interactions between people that unlock the potential of each of these in realising the potential of innovative urbanism (Bureau of Shanghai, 2005b). Concepts of the human are reduced to qualities associated with production, known as ‘human resource’ or human talent (Pun and Wu, 2004) rather than as labour power. As Dreyer (2012: 54) has observed, ‘The narrative of the last 15 years and the Expo in particular seems precisely to be that liberation will come through economic change and the greater access to technology that it will provide, and not through political change, which at best is acknowledged as an unfortunate side effect’.

A small survey conducted by scholars at Beijing Normal University before, during and after the Expo captures these dynamics as experienced by some local residents (Wang et al., 2012). The survey was an attempt to assess residents’ perceptions of the Expo in relation to the ideals promulgated through the theme of Better City, Better Life. It revealed general dissatisfaction on key indicators. Respondents were generally impressed with new infrastructure and the city’s global connectedness and business climate, but satisfaction with public participation rated the lowest of all the categories covered by the survey. Responses to questions of governance ‘supported that Shanghai branding was essentially a top-down enforced project with little initiative from the grassroots level, passive public participation and involvement in the process (Wang et al., 2012: 1290). The authors continue that many respondents had negative views on social issues, including equality and social.

Lurking behind these various constructions of the social and performances of ‘citizenship’ is the reality of an urban population that has shown itself unwilling to go quietly into the night, of an unruly social always looking for a way back in. In a study of resident activism in Shanghai, Jiangang Zhu draws our attention to the figure of the ‘bad citizen’, a designation used by officials to characterise (potentially) disruptive inhabitants; in this case, political activists (Zhu, 2004). This is an interesting and important figure, one that is never wholly invisible, or subdued, but that is poised at the edges, and at times inside of civilised and exclusive world-class spaces, providing an image for the urban inhabitant who may yet claim a right to the city.

Conclusion: The social question

上海欢迎你欢迎来买东西

Shanghai welcomes you, welcomes you to come buy things

千万不要忘记带上人民币

Don’t forget to bring millions of yuan

上海欢迎你奥运会有什么了不起

Shanghai welcomes you, what was so great about the Olympics?

让我们在世博会相聚

Let Expo bring us together

上海欢迎你欢迎来买东西

Shanghai welcomes you, welcomes you to come buy things

我们没有文化但是有人民币

We don’t have any culture, but we’ve got Renminbi

‘Shanghai Welcomes You’

The above lyrics are from a song by Shanghai-based Top Floor Circus, described by the Shanghaiist blog, which provided the translation, as an art-punk band (Chow, 2009). Though addressed to tourists, the song captures the underlying contradiction between the Expo vision for a better city and the emergent meaning of inclusion and belonging in its new world-class spaces. The city is welcoming, if you have Renminbi and are prepared to spend them. The Expo – and wider transformation it represents – will bring people together, but around cosmopolitan consumerism. The critique captured in the lyrics is one instance of the social intruding upon the grand narratives spun by utopian city builders. It reminds us that no matter how much displacement occurs, or how tightly world-class spaces are regulated, the unruly social is always just around the corner.

The significance of the social as it appears in these spaces, given that in most cities most residents live outside of them, lies in its merger with world-class aesthetics and market rationalities at the level of sub-urban spaces. Through this we are presented with a new iteration of participation and, by extension, politics, in city planning specifically, and city making more generally. While it may be true that the transformative urban struggles of the future will take place outside of these spaces, an examination of the inside is valuable because it allows us to better understand the structures that cast shadows on the rest of the city. These structures are not just physical, but also discursive, creating representations of social conflict and politics that also obscure much of the city, its grey and dark corners, while creating citizens who are encouraged to act within a polity that exists at considerable social distance from the rest of the city.

The lacerating sarcasm of Top Floor Circus and the more prosaic concerns revealed in the Beijing Normal University survey results lend support to the argument that market-driven mega-events and mega-developments can create or widen spaces of contestation, that they can expose rather than obscure existing social problems (Gotham, 2011). Successful relocation of populations does not, in fact, mark an end to struggles over the social, it simply changes the terrain upon which they take place. Rather than closing opportunities for politics, the related processes of creating world-class spaces and divided cities produces new opportunities for dialogue and critique that contradict the intentions of organisers and utopian city builders: in seeking predictability, city builders are simply creating the conditions for future instabilities.

There is much here to reflect on for the future of the social and the city as China commits itself to urban and consumer-driven growth. It is all too common in popular discourse to dismiss the processes of redevelopment and exclusion in China as reflections of an authoritarian political system, but the reality is we can observe virtually identical processes elsewhere. The lack of community participation in planning, for example, is not unique to Shanghai or China; instead it is a feature of urban governance that helps to define new urban politics on a global scale and underscores the convergence in practice, at least at some level, of governance regimes (Defilippis, 2003; Purcell, 2002; Samara et al., 2013b; Watson, 2009; Zhang T, 2002). Even the often brutal process of evictions is an all too common feature of urban governance globally, across a range of democratic and non-democratic regimes (BBC, 2013; Nossiter, 2013; UN Habitat, 2011).

Indeed, if we are to generalise at all about the repression and exclusion that shapes so many cities today, then the breadth and intensity of world city-making processes rather than national political system would appear to be a more empirically grounded frame of reference. This is not to absolve city authorities in Shanghai of responsibility for the many abuses involved in creating world-class spaces or for the creation of exclusive spaces that cement rather than confront urban inequalities. It is simply to point out that the excision of the social in the process of urban transformation is a global phenomenon. If anything, hosting the World Expo helped to bring Shanghai into line with ‘international best practice’ and to harmonise Shanghai’s urban spaces with those of other cities.

The often dramatic transformation of cities in a time of rising inequality has pushed the issue of democracy to the forefront of the urban agenda for scholars, policy makers and residents themselves. Growing interest in Henri Lefebvre’s work on right to the city and the production of space over the past decade, for example, is due to the perception that urban governance is moving in profoundly anti-democratic directions (Harvey, 2008; Purcell, 2002; Samara, 2012). More broadly, policy and scholarly debates surrounding redevelopment often involve discussion of the role residents play (or do not play) in the planning and implementation of changes to their communities and lives, in addition to discussion of the social and political impact of these changes themselves, reflecting long-running debates in development studies. Shanghai has shown that rapid transformation of the city is possible. But the challenge remains, in urban China and elsewhere, to create a vision for the urban future that does not consign most of its residents to the shadows.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the guest editors of this special issue, Shenjing He and George CS Lin, and three anonymous referees of this paper.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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