Sporting Shanghai: Haipai Cosmopolitanism, Glocal Cityness, and Urban Policy as Mega-Event

Abstract

In recent years, Shanghai has become one of Asia’s major players in the bidding for, and hosting of, international sporting events. Uniquely positioned by history (e.g., China’s liberalized urban node to the globalizing economy, an imbedded urban cosmopolitanism) and geopolitics (e.g., a shift toward free market domestic political economy, a growing pro-corporatist governing alliance), sporting Shanghai provides a critical site of analysis for contemporary sport-based global-localisms. In this study, we examine how local culture, global commercialism, and policy discourse intersect to “produce” the global sporting city. We conclude with a discussion of how sport in this context is manufactured not only as economic, social, and political catalyst, but also how sport policy itself represents a conjunctural city as “modernization” event.