Nostalgia is dangerous. While it may be important to know what has happened in the past, too fond a reading of it may well blind the viewer to possibilities for the future. Shanghai's history is justifiably famous, some would even say infamous; the city is very well-known, yet many people only experience it vicariously, either through watching a film or reading a book. How the city is portrayed tells us a lot about how people perceive it, whether it is the inaccurately slapdash imagery of Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams) or the lavishly recreated street scenes of Lust, Caution (Ang Lee). Books too play a role in selling Shanghai; novels such as When We Were Orphans (Kazuo Ishiguro) and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Wang Anyi) are permeated with nostalgia for a vanished way of life – the upper-class glamour of the former contrasting with the down-to-earth everyday life of the alleyway house in the latter.1 This emergence of nostalgia is something that some other commentators have also picked up on, notably Lena Scheen in her essay on Shanghai's longtang houses, ‘Sensual, but No Clue of Politics’ (Bracken 2012), and is something that I will be warning about in this essay.

There is something spectacular about a city like Shanghai. And, like its regional neighbours, Hong Kong and Tokyo, the city is seen a backdrop for international forces, where marquee architecture sets the scene for its global ambitions. In a rapidly globalising China, where there has been a wholehearted embrace of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, the city has become the site for another kind of spectacle: that of conspicuous consumption. Yet in order to make way for the new urban forms that facilitate this global growth, a long-established way of life is being swept aside.

Asia's explosive urbanisation has forced all eyes on the subject of the city. The city has, accordingly, become a recurrent theme in popular culture and art, which is part of the rising tide of consumerist culture submerging the reality of ordinary daily life. What are the aesthetic responses to this process of overall disruption in both individual and collective experience? As an urbanist who originally trained and practiced as an architect, my chapter will focus more on the built environment of Shanghai than on the cinematic or literary portrayals of it.