Designing China's urban future: The Greater Shanghai Plan, 1927–1937

Abstract

Among the world's greatest cities — New York, London, Paris and Tokyo — Shanghai ranks as a singular phenomenon. Its survival in the face of a startling expansion and rise to prominence, within a scant 140 years, was based on the melding of Chinese and foreign efforts to lay down its urban infrastructures and in ‘planning’ its future. Yet, since 1949, these efforts, particularly the Greater Shanghai Plan of 1927, have been ignored in the literature or dismissed as aberrant. However, the origins and objectives of the Plan were anything but an aberration. Founded solidly on decades of intense efforts to create a Chinese municipality that would parallel the achievements of the foreign settlements, the Plan's objectives went beyond mere imitation. For the Plan called for the redevelopment of the port as well as the creation of a new city centre that would be an irrefutable statement of Shanghai's, and therefore China's, determination to challenge and exceed the urban standards and prosperity of the foreign se...