Abstract
ABSTRACTThe Chinese mega city of Shanghai is currently undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric and aspires to become a future city and a world center. This article delineates an encapsulation of a future gaze in the city among cosmopolitan visitors, mediated through travel reporting, travel guides and expatriate websites. Shanghai is a multisensuous and highly engaging geography and invokes a future gaze which, in contrast with the alleged detachment of the tourist gaze, has to be interpreted in terms of an immersion of the whole body, and in relation to acts of drinking and eating in the chronotopes of nostalgic dwelling—the mansion garden and the restaurant. In addition, futurology in Shanghai is dependent upon a craze for history, and as travelers engage with and perform a collective memory of the Golden Age of the twenties and thirties, the city enacts a specific experience of time travel. This article shows how analyzing the intersensorium may yield a more critical evaluation of how visitors make sense of and contribute to the transformation of the city and further probes how sensory response, sentiment, memory and mediation work together.
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