Amnesiac Monument, Nostalgic Fashion

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Nineteenth-century residents in the foreign settlements considered their stay in the city as temporary sojourns [yuju]. For a recent study of Shanghai courtesan houses, see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. ‘Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things: Business, Gender, and Material Culture in Flowers of Shanghai’ . Modern China 33 . 3 2007 : 377 – 418 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Ephemeral Households’; for neighbourhood culture in nineteenth century Shanghai see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. . ‘High-Tech Cities and the Primitive Jungle: Visionary Urbanism in Europe and Japan of the 1960s’ . International Studies in Philosophy 36 . 2 2004 : 45 – 66 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ‘Where the courtyard meets the street’. 2. The ‘old mole’ revolution of the proletarian masses is a central idea in Marx's Communist Manifesto — see Bataille Bataille , Georges . ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Word Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist’ . Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 . Trans. Allen Stoekl et al. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1985 . 32 – 44 . [Google Scholar]. 3. It was during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 that Shui On transferred its capital from the hard-hit Hong Kong into Shanghai, whose economy was then relatively independent of the global economy. 4. Deploying architecture and urban building programmes as a means to solve social problems was a central concern of European avant-garde movements. When an architectural revolution replaces the social one, it becomes more like a play in a theme park. An example of such urban revolution is Constant's New Babylon Project (1958–1972) (and the Situationist International's unitary urbanism); see Liang Liang , Samuel Y. . ‘Where the courtyard meets the street: Spatial culture of the Li Neighborhoods, Shanghai 1870–1900’ . Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67.4 (forthcoming Dec. 2008) . [Google Scholar], ‘High-Tech Cities’. 5. This spatial restructuring of Shanghai can be seen within the big picture of recent developments in ‘world cities’ such as London and New York (eg see King King , Anthony D. Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the Twenty-First Century Metropolis . London : Macmillan , 1996 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The kind of global ethos which Shanghai now clearly represents is not unique and is, in some sense, characteristic of the modernisation of cosmopolitan urban nodes of capitalist economy. (For pointing this out, I am indebted to the editor Suman Gupta.) 6. Except for Figure 11, all pictures were taken by the author in the summers of 2006 and 2007.