ABSTRACT

China’s concomitant demographic, economic and urban transitions have brought about commodification of space in urban centres characterized by sociospatial difference. This chapter looks at everyday life on the borderland between two very different fragments of urban space in Shanghai: one new and flourishing, representing the envisioned future; the other stigmatized and dilapidated, representing the unmemorable past. On the borderland, rural-to-urban migrants, urban poor and a new generation of middle-class professionals coexist in space and time. I look at the spaces that they appropriate and inhabit in the context of an everpresent state, claiming that Shanghai’s borderlands constitute the link between the past and the future and might give rise to a new urbanity.