Grimy Heritage: Organic Bar Streets in Shanghai and Tokyo

James Farrer

doi:10.1186/bf03545745

Abstract

Every city has built environments that are largely regarded as eyesores, for aesthetic, social, or moral reasons. Urban nightlife streets are examples of such ‘grimy heritage’. Not only shabby and disorderly, they harbour forms of commercial sex, drinking cultures, and ephemeral nightlife cultures that many city residents and government officials consider undesirable. Sometimes their built forms are regarded as the enemy of genuine heritage architecture, since they obscure more solid, carefully designed structures around them. However, in many cities, organic nightlife streets—developing in such spaces precisely because they were derelict or poorly regulated—serve important social functions as spaces of creativity and community formation. This paper examines the ways that such ‘grimy heritage’ has developed in Shanghai and Tokyo, using examples from ethnographic research and historical sources, and addressing the question of the contribution of the ‘grimy heritage’ to authentic, urban social life.

Highlights

A great city needs a little grime, a dark side, or put another way, if the skyscraper is the representation of a phallic, ascendant modernist striving, the shadowy demimonde of bars and cabarets is an potent symbol of the urban feminine modern: a modernism of dangerous and dirty pleasures: the nocturnal, exotic, sexual, and drunken fun that city girls are imagined to get up to (Weinbaum et al 2008)
When nightlife zones re-emerged in both cities, they developed in times of economic scarcity and political uncertainty and took the form of informal and organic bar streets that more closely resembled the nocturnal frontier zones of earlier decades
Shanghai and Tokyo both have a grimy heritage in the form of vernacular, or organic nightlife zones that go back to their origins as modern cities

Summary

Geographies of Grime

A great city needs a little grime, a dark side, or put another way, if the skyscraper is the representation of a phallic, ascendant modernist striving, the shadowy demimonde of bars and cabarets is an potent symbol of the urban feminine modern: a modernism of dangerous and dirty pleasures: the nocturnal, exotic, sexual, and drunken fun that city girls are imagined to get up to (Weinbaum et al 2008). Often appearing in the city as the result of an agglomeration of independent small businesses, organic bar streets are not the prestigious high-end entertainment districts—such as Odaiba in Tokyo or the Cool Docks in Shanghai—that are purpose built to attract tourism and convention revenue and are relatively separate from places where urban residents work and stroll. They are not the high-end historic ballroom, theatre, and restaurant districts celebrated in both touristic and scholarly writing (Field 2010). Organic bar streets in Tokyo and Shanghai have much in common, but the reactions of outsiders and neighbours to their presence has differed greatly, showing differing attitudes toward these examples of ‘grimy heritage’ and, as a consequence, different trajectories for the development of urban nightscapes in these two cities

Conceptualising Urban Drinking Streets

Nightlife Districts and Informal Bar Streets in Shanghai and Tokyo

The Emergence and Survival of Organic Bar Streets in Tokyo

The Emergence and Suppression of Organic Bar Streets in Shanghai

Findings

Conclusions