ABSTRACT
Tucked behind the freshly laid adobe brick walls, first-time visitors to Rancho Santa Fe – a luxurious gated community in Shanghai’s Hua Cao County southwest of the city centre – will be struck by the startling sight of palm trees, orange-stucco houses and miniature barnyards juxtaposed against the dwindling farmlands and ramshackle houses nearby, where Chinese farmers can still be seen tilling the soil and tending to vegetable plots. Located near the Shanghai-American International School, the exotic and romanticized landscapes of ‘Spanish-American homestead’ in the estate, complete with verdant greenery and foreign-sounding street names such as Monterey Avenue and Del Mar Street, is part of Vanke property developers’ attempts at imagineering an ostensibly ‘Southern California lifestyle’ enclave (Figure 4.1). ‘Welcome to Rancho Santa Fe, Shanghai’s premier Southern Californian-style suburb’, a gigantic billboard announces to passers-by in both English and Mandarin. According to the developer’s brochure,Rancho Santa Fe or Lanjia Shenfei is a place where there are ‘no city’s noise’ and ‘no traffic jams’, ‘where life is so beautiful and happy’ and ‘full of rurality and sunshine’ – at least for those well-heeled urbanites who can afford to buy into the much coveted ‘villa lifestyle’ (bieshu shenghuo), where each villa unit costs at least 450 million yuan.
