ABSTRACT
Shanghai attempted to integrate urban planning and land management into one municipal unit, but this municipal-level integration was in contradiction to the split between land management and urban planning in the national level. In the reform era, Minhang became an urban district of Shanghai, and the district government established Minhang Economic and Technological Development Zone next to the industrial town built in the 1950s. The persistent cellular urbanism demonstrates the continuity between urban planning in the socialist and postsocialist eras and the imperial city planning. The persistent cellular urbanism is a quite different kind of spatial fragmentation than the spatial fragmentation or division regulated by zoning practices in North American cities. The contradiction between planning and spatial fragmentation was also highly visible within the work-unit compound, whose growth and multiplication often resulted in the contrasting orderly main compound and less orderly living quarter.
