Shanghai New Towns, Searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis

摘要

'Shanghai is the head of the dragon of China's modernisation' stated Deng Xiaoping on visiting China's commercial capital in 1990. Since the launch of China's transition to a socialist market economy in 1978, Shanghai has been the engine of China's economic growth and focus for its experiments with urbanisation as China moves from a rural to urban society. This lavishly illustrated bilingual collection of essays by ten Chinese and Western critics covers both China's urbanisation and the attempts of the Shanghai Municipality to decentralise the city while safeguarding the fertile agricultural land of the Yangtse delta. Jiang Jun, editor of Urban China magazine, gives an historical overview explaining the danwei system - worker unit housing introduced in 1949 that divided the population into rural and urban danweis.