Industry in Shanghai between East and West. Introduction // Industria a Shanghai tra Oriente e Occidente. Introduzione

In 1937, the coming of war saw the swift eclipse of Shanghai, one of the capitals of international modernism. The rules and rituals of a complex and cosmopolitan society, contemporaneously characterised by a profound social disparity and by opportunities for social mobility unthinkable in the rest of China, dissolved on the cusp of the Second World War. Blessed with a unique resilience, Shanghai has always risen from the ashes—albeit taking on a new character each time—reaffirming its singular vocation to find a position which is simultaneously universal and barycentric to the cultures and economies of East and West. Thus the reflection of its material existence, of its buildings and of the original structure of the city takes on particular importance. At a local level this was rooted in the relationship between the Shanghai of the Chinese government, and of the territories which were international concessions for many generations; on a global level it was down to the economic and political relations between East and West. In the mid-1930s, Shanghai was the largest industrial city in China; the factories and the opium producers occupied the outermost reaches, made up of canals and workers’ housing, and the central district, where the city was grandly centred on the Bund, the riverside road of concessions which grazed the Imperial city. The current urban structure still forcefully presents the unusual polycentric configuration of the historic city, which clearly reflects the economic structure, social classes, and the various cultures which have generated them. These elements are today connected in a relationship with a megalopolis which has, over the last thirty years, quickly rediscovered the commercial and production role it once had. Shanghai is the largest port in the world for goods, and carries this primacy into its umpteenth phase of maturity. At the same time, interest is growing in the city’s cultural heritage which—in its many forms—represents a common thread running through the various seasons of the city’s flowerings. Among the examples of reuse and initiatives of urban regeneration which never quite took off, the undeniable planning role played by the Chinese administrations offers an opportunity to analyse different models and practices of reclamation from restoration to adaptive re-use. Here the architectonic, constructional, and urban elements are conditioned by specific practices of the management and planning of post-industrial areas through agencies of urban development, which collect (to varying degrees of criticalness) the tools with which landscape design and regenerative urban planning are introduced into the international discussion