International Journal of Heritage Studies

ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20

Gentrifying heritage: how historic preservation

drives gentrification in urban Shanghai

Non Arkaraprasertkul

To cite this article: Non Arkaraprasertkul (2019) Gentrifying heritage: how historic preservation
drives gentrification in urban Shanghai, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25:9, 882-896,
DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2018.1460732

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1460732

Published online: 18 Apr 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES
2019, VOL. 25, NO. 9, 882–896
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1460732

Gentrifying heritage: how historic preservation drives

gentrification in urban Shanghai
Non Arkaraprasertkula,b
a
The Institute of the Middle and Far East, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland; bFaculty of Business Administration,
Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon, Bangkok, Thailand

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In Shanghai, one can not only see, but live in the remnants of the city’s semi- Received 22 March 2018
colonial legacy. These are the remaining lane houses known as lilong that Accepted 31 March 2018
are scattered throughout the city. Urbanites living in foreign settlements
KEYWORDS
built them and resided there between the late nineteenth century to the Shanghai; gentrification;
mid 1940s. Confiscated by the Communist government upon its takeover urbanisation; social change;
in 1949, these buildings were redistributed to socialist workers and later on urban space
heavily altered to accommodate the massive influx of migrants during the
first two decades of the opening up and reform era. The lilong houses are
an important part of the memories of local Shanghainese residents. In this
paper, I look primarily at the original residents’ savviness in capitalising on
heritage as a source of income and thereby using it as a defence against
economic precariousness. I argue that the high level of flexibility of the
notion of heritage enables a form of gentrification that differs from classic
gentrification whereby middle-class residents push the working class out of
a neighbourhood. The original working-class residents who understand the
value system of the middle class are those profiting thanks to their ability
to ‘sell’ the old lilong buildings as historically important and ultimately
as middle-class heritage. This process, however, eventually produces a
middle-class enclave similar to that of a classic gentrified neighbourhood.
The remnants of the past such as those found in these traditional-looking
neighbourhoods facilitate original residents’ navigation of the abrupt social
changes wrought by the market-driven urban Chinese economy of the past
three decades.

Introduction
Sitting on a wooden stool in front of a long table made from a single slab of wood, I was facing a tea
connoisseur who seemed to know all about the origins of the many kinds of tea for which China is
famous. This tea ‘master’ liked to be called by his Chinese nickname that could be translated roughly
into English as ‘Old Tiger.’ He wore a knee-length robe over trousers woven from the same blue cotton
fabric. To a layperson, his outfit looked like a more formal version of Tai-Chi attire. Looking around
the room, I only saw antique objects, such as emerald green tea pots and tea cups, and antique-look-
ing tins containing tea leaves. The drapes drawn back to the sides of the seven-foot-high door that

CONTACT  Non Arkaraprasertkul  non@mit.edu

© 2018 Non Arkaraprasertkul. Published with license by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 883

was open to a small square courtyard were carefully selected by Old Tiger himself as, according to
him, ‘they look old, and classy.’ The tranquillity surrounding us also added to the ritual. The com-
plicated process that Old Tiger had to go through to make tea for us took about five minutes, and
judging from his explanation during the process it might be fair to say that these steps were not just
preferable but mandatory to deliver tea with the best possible taste. Old Tiger asked me to drink the
tea immediately, which I did and it was delicious. With his outfit and softly accented Mandarin, one
could easily videotape him in black and white and fool people into believing that the film was from
the early twentieth century.
It was only when leaving the compound in which the master resided that one would realise that
they were indeed in the middle of a megalopolis of 24 million residents: in 2016 when I visited Old
Tiger Shanghai was one of the world’s largest cities. The reason for the high price for the tea plus the
service charge gradually became apparent to me: the ritual was created for those visitors who wanted
to hark back to the uniqueness of ‘traditional Shanghai’ and an immersive experience. The building
itself with its peculiar architectural style, the interior décor, and the performance and attire of Old Tiger
were all part of the experience. ‘I tried to create this kind of teahouse in a modern high-rise building,
but none of my customers wanted to go there:’ said Old Tiger who had tried to establish his teahouse
at two other locations before moving into this neighbourhood; one of these was in a one-bedroom
studio on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise residential building overlooking the city’s skyline. He
said that neither location gave customers the ‘sense of tradition’ for which they were looking to enjoy
his handpicked teas from three different parts of China (Figure 1).

Figure 1. An aerial image of a typical alleyway houses in Shanghai. Photograph: Sue Anne Tay (Shanghai Street Stories Blog: http://
shanghaistreetstories.com).

It was only when he saw the old house that he came up with the idea of selling ‘something truly
traditional’ to visitors willing to spend money for the experience. As we became friends, he shared
with me the different techniques he used to get people pay more than they should for his tea. Tea,
to him, was ‘a bridge between the past and the present’ for Chinese people. ‘It’s so traditional to the
884 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

Figure 2. A map showing the location of Shanghai in the larger geographic context of Asia. Source: A free based map available on
the free version of the open-Ssurce CartoDB Software as a Service (SaaS).
Note: Details of the map are embedded by the description of the SaaS at the bottom right corner of the figure.

point that only those who can afford the time to consume it slowly can be regarded as the classy ones
in this fast-paced society,’ said Old Tiger. ‘Once this particular secret to selling tea today became clear
to me, I knew that all I needed to do was to create a “traditional experience” for those who see such
experiences as a mark of high class.’ It was precisely this moment that encouraged Old Tiger to make
the decision to move to his current neighbourhood. This decision was reinforced by an acquaintance
who told him that his antique jewellery business was blossoming selling antique jewellery in a similarly
old-looking compound. The reasoning this acquaintance shared with him was simple:
It feels real to the customers. It’s as much about storytelling as the content. In fact, if I have to choose one, it’s
the story (gushi) and not the content (neirong). At the end of the day, what we are selling is history and not the
products which they could get from anywhere these days including on taobao (an online platform for product
selling in China similar to Amazon.com).
Every week, two dozen guests would come to Old Tigers’ teahouse to try his tea, watch his tea ceremony,
and buy his tea and tea sets. The setup, the backgrounds, the space of the teahouse, were all created to
maximise the impact on the viewers and showcase what Old Tiger offered, namely, ‘real courses on
traditional Chinese culture’ in his view (Figure 2).
In this paper, I focus on the relations between heritage and gentrification. I look primarily at
how the original residents interact with existing and potential buyers, renters, and investors who are
drawn to use old and unique buildings for small ‘cultural’ businesses such as Old Tiger’s teahouse.
Local residents are becoming aware of the cultural capital of heritage and capitalise on it to maintain
their livelihood (See Arkaraprasertkul 2016a). In this paper, my focus is not Old Tiger but rather his
landlord, who is ‘using’ Old Tiger and his customers as a defence against economic precariousness.
Although entrepreneurs like Old Tiger are the ones who are visible in the neighbourhood, the mas-
terminds are the landlords.
In re-thinking classic gentrification whereby the middle-class residents push the working class out
of a neighbourhood by way of capital, I argue that the high level of flexibility of the notion of heritage
gives rise to another form of gentrification. Understanding the value system of the middle-class, the
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 885

Figure 3. A photograph showing the main lane servicing two sandwiching rows of (in this specific photo) renovated lilong houses
on both sides. Photograph: Author.

former working-class residents profit from renting or selling their buildings as heritage to middle-class
residents. The result is a middle-class enclave similar to that of a gentrified neighbourhood. For most
of Shanghai’s working-class residents, ‘heritage’ consists of ‘old buildings that are becoming rare’
(and therefore sought after, see Arkaraprasertkul 2016a). The meaning of ‘old’ here is also contested,
as from a historical perspective, most of the buildings understood as such in Shanghai are not even a
century-old (Liang 2008; Lu 1999). Thanks to what Michael Herzfeld (2004) calls the ‘global hierarchy
of value,’ that is, the neoliberal logic that ranks products of people’s labour according to how close they
are to a mythologized version of the European past, ‘heritage’ is uncritically equated with ‘authenticity’
(Esposito et al. 2014; Harvey 2001; Winter 2013). Building on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in
urban neighbourhoods in Shanghai (see Arkaraprasertkul 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2013,
2016a, 2016b, 2017; Williams and Arkaraprasertkul 2015), I argue that the remnants of the past like
lilong houses have become mediums through which the original residents deal with and navigate the
abrupt social change brought about by the market-driven economy governing urban China over the
past three decades (Hsing 2010).

Shanghai lane houses: from housing to heritage

The house that Old Tiger rented was a lane house known in the local dialect as the ‘lilong’.1 Built
between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, their builders had no clue that these
ordinary housing complexes would become scarce and therefore hot commodities rich with cultural
capital only a century later. The official narrative of state-sponsored museums across Shanghai (He
2004, 2010) emphasises how the lilong astutely combined western ideas of economical housing with a
touch of Chinese aesthetics that eventually helped to make them an integral part of the city’s dwelling
culture (Bracken 2013) (Figure 3).
886 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

Figure 4. An aerial view of the International Settlement of Shanghai, ca. 1934, showing the city’s overall urban form dominated
by the lilong houses. Source: Virtual Shanghai Project (Image ID: 2024; Title: Bird’s-eye view of the Public Recreation Ground and
surroundings; repository: Institut d’Asie Orientale).

The use of the lilong shifted from housing the Shanghainese elites during the treaty port era (1842–
1945) to accommodating the high demand for housing stock for socialist workers in the high-socialist
era (1949–1978) that immediately followed (Lu, Rowe, and Zhang 2001). Foreigners and middle-class
Shanghai residents owned single lilong houses until the Sino-Japanese War broke out in the late
1930s. By the early 1940s during World War II most foreigners had fled Shanghai. After the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) gained power over their Nationalist counterparts in 1949, only a small
number of foreigners were allowed to stay in China. As the original owners had fled the mainland,
the majority of the lilong houses were confiscated and redistributed to local residents (Peng 1986).
Under the influence of the USSR socialist commune system, the CCP centralised the economy and
implemented a government-controlled work unit system called the ‘iron rice bowl,’ which gave workers
free housing, schooling and health care in urban areas. During the Maoist, high socialist era between
1949 and 1978, Shanghainese work unit workers occupied the lilong neighbourhoods. But owing to a
combination of heavy use, lack of maintenance, and the very nature of the architecture (often made of
wood), the lilong houses aged rapidly making it difficult for residents to live in them (Arkaraprasertkul
2016c; Morris 1994; Pellow 1993) (Figure 4).
Since the early 1980s, China has experienced massive economic growth. The 200,000 lilong units
were adequate for three million city residents in the 1930s but were not enough to accommodate 11
million in the early 1980s (Wu 1999). Hence, the local government turned to the market to build
more housing for the new residents. No longer the most economic form of housing, thousands of
lilong neighbourhoods were demolished during this period to make way for higher-density housing
typologies such as mid-rise walk-ups and high-rise apartments (Davis 2010; Dowall 1994; Dwyer
1986). Housing is a basic public need to be fulfilled; nevertheless, housing became an issue when the
government opened the market to private investors and decided to take a more hands-off approach.
Not only was Shanghai a destination for job seeking migrants, but it was also a destination for foreign
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 887

Figure 5. An aerial photograph of a surviving lilong surrounded by ‘more economical’ building types such as mid-rise walk-ups and
high-rise apartments. Photograph: Sue Anne Tay (Shanghi Street Stories Blog: http://shanghaistreetstories.com).

entrepreneurs and professionals including company executives. Real estate has subsequently played
a crucial role in the spatial restructuring of the city. With a growing urban population, there was a
housing shortage in the early 1980s (Kim 1987). In order to provide more housing at a rapid pace,
the local government stopped large-scale socialist-style housing provision through work units and
allowed private developers, including joint-ventures between private developers and state-owned
enterprises, to enter the market. By ‘resorting to’ private developers, a large city like Shanghai could
produce a large number of housing units to accommodate the growing population (Huang 2000). Yet,
this does not mean that the local government abandoned social housing provision completely. In fact,
local governments have continued to run a so-called ‘dual-track’ system; while the real estate market
takes care of upper and middle-class housing, the local government continues to provide housing to
the low-income and mostly retired residents who are still tied to the work-unit system through its
housing subsidy programme (See Arkaraprasertkul 2016a) (Figure 5).
For more than a hundred years, the lilong houses epitomised Shanghai’s dwelling culture
(Arkaraprasertkul 2009). While some of these buildings had been converted to public use, most of
them had been altered to accommodate the influx of residents and workers. Old Tiger’s landlord
(fangdong) had been a worker between the 1970s and the 1990s before retiring and moving to live
with his children in a high-rise apartment elsewhere (Luo and Zhang 2007; Mo and Lu 2000; Wang
and Chen 1987). Like many of his fellow workers, this landlord initially had a house provided by his
work unit and eventually obtained the right to own it after having lived there for more than three
decades throughout the high socialist era (Peng 1987). It was during the opening up and reform era
that residents such as Old Tiger’s landlord were allowed to own and therefore freely rent or even sell
their houses. Like many migrant workers attracted to large cities because of better job opportunities,
888 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

especially in the service sector, Hunan-born Old Tiger came to Shanghai in the mid-2000s to find
work following an old friend’s invitation and network (guanxi). But, as pointed out in the opening
vignette, Old Tiger quickly found a niche for himself in the small teahouse business. Although he never
revealed to me whether or not he had his own family, it seemed clear that he still needed to remit his
income back to his parents still living in his Hunan hometown. When this landlord rented out his
living room to the teahouse entrepreneur, Old Tiger spent more than 60,000 yuan (about US$10,000
in 2017) and about two months to renovate, fix, and redecorate it to make it look like a tea house in
the Late Qing Dynasty – as it was when I first saw it.
When asked about the local government’s effort to protect these buildings, Old Tiger responded,
‘the local government was more concerned with the exterior of the buildings, which was no use to my
business.’ In fact, the local government did not completely ignore the interior of the buildings as Old
Tiger claimed, as there was a considerable effort to improve the living conditions of the residents of
these houses, particularly during the year leading up to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo in 2010 (Larmer
2010; The Guardian 2010). The local government installed sprinklers and portable fire extinguishers
installed in the public areas where residents shared basic amenities such as bathrooms and kitchens.
‘It was faster – and better – when we renovated our own spaces but many do not have that option so
they could only wait for the local government to do it for them,’ said Old Tiger.

Historic preservation in Shanghai: an anthropological reading

This neighbourhood of Tranquil Light where Old Tiger rented the room for his teahouse is located
in the centre of the city. The 198 buildings still standing today in the neighbourhood accommodate
around 950 households of one to three persons. These data were provided publically by the neigh-
bourhood committee (juweihui) and also had been crosschecked with the data on the population of
localities from the yearly almanack of the district in which the Tranquil Light is located. The population
of registered residents did not fluctuate much from 1999 to 2011: the number of families (hu) was
between 1280 (in 2011) to 1558 (2010), and the number of residents (ren; headcount) increased from
3893 (in 1997–1998) to 4423 (2009). About 3,000 residents were living there when I carried out my
fieldwork. About one-third of these 3,000 residents of Tranquil Light were renting rooms from these
old residents. Old Tiger and I were two of those one-thirds. In order to better publicise and sublet
their vacant rooms, most local residents were using WeChat – a so-called Chinese ‘super app’ giving
users the possibility to send messages, tweet, and make electronic person-to-person payments, among
other functions. These posts were accompanied by photos of the room to help prospective tenants
visualise the size and orientation of the room. Natural lighting was the most important element taken
into consideration by the local Chinese renters in making their choices. Foreign tenants, on the other
hand, were more interested in the location and the size of the room. Information about the vacant
rooms circulated swiftly through this network of hundreds of millions of people using WeChat in
Shanghai and all over China; they could swiftly and conveniently forward these visual posts, referring
the vacant rooms to their friends and acquaintances (Figure 6).
Some local residents targeting foreign tenants instead used AirBnB, a global online peer-to-peer
marketplace for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. With their children helping them write their
posts in English, they could advertise their spaces at ease. Sometimes desirable rooms got snatched
up within hours after having been posted. In the eyes of many, including the local and international
media, the defining characteristic of this community is the co-existence of long-term owners with
young renters from a variety of backgrounds, occupations, interests, and lifestyles. The local and
international media were particularly interested in the ‘unique’ experience that the neighbourhood
offered (Arkaraprasertkul 2016a). Tranquil Light gave the impression of a gentrified neighbourhood
thanks to the living patterns of its residents. From a demographic perspective, however, Tranquil
Light was not a particularly ‘gentrified’ neighbourhood as most residents were still working class. As
I have argued elsewhere (see Arkaraprasertkul 2016b), what prevented Tranquil Light from being
fully consumed by the external capital generally known as gentrification was the ambiguous rights of
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 889

Figure 6. An example of a local-to-local advertisement of a vacant room in a lilong.

Notes: The caption reads ‘An eleven-square -metre well-furnished room with three-square-metre shared bathroom with another girl. Good ventilation
from north to south, as the room is situated between the first and second floors (tingzijian or “pavilion room” of the building). The name of the
compound is Bright Prospects New Village. The distance is ten-minute-walk from Calm and Peaceful Villa [a well-known liong neighbourhood].
Rent is CNY2,500 per month’ (USD380 per the exchange rate of November 2017). This advertisement is used with the permission of the advertiser who
wishes to remain anonymous.

the original residents both to the particular unit they owned and to the land on which the buildings
stood. These residents did not have the right to sell even though they had already moved out; hence,
renting their spaces to others was the best option available to them to benefit from their ‘properties.’
All they had to do was to keep both their and their renters’ heads low, otherwise the authorities would
have discovered their misuse of the rent-controlled properties and evicted them.2
The few residents with right of possession had their own set of problems. On the one hand, they
could never know when the government would expropriate their private property for public use. In
which case, they would not be compensated for the loss of their houses at the market price; hence,
it would be logical for them to want to sell their properties to other private owners when they could
still do it. At the same time, they did not want to sell their properties prematurely just to find that
they could have made much more money in the context of the rising demand for housing in central
Shanghai. Residents like Old Tiger were more active and publicly visible than the old residents who
were mainly retirees. With new visitors, the lanes were often populated by a diversity of people. In
particularly, the curious foreigners were attracted by small businesses like Old Tiger’s teahouse who
also enjoyed taking pictures of the old facades.
890 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

The effort to protect these buildings began in the late 1990s after more than a century of heavy
usage. In the mind-set of the local Shanghainese, the idea of ‘historic preservation’ (wenwu baohu)
does not have the same meaning as in historic towns elsewhere in China (Wang and Bramwell 2012).
This may, to a degree, be generalised to other Chinese cities that were also once foreign treaty ports.3
In these treaty ports, locals compare their ‘foreign’ architecture to China’s own traditional architecture,
and tend to see these ‘foreign’ buildings as historic owing to their physical uniqueness in China rather
than their historical importance (Cody 2001; Johnston and Er 1993).4 Over time, these buildings have
become so dilapidated that residents often prefer to move to other places where amenities such as
electricity, running water, and gas supply for cooking are available (Fan 2004). Thus, with very little
resistance on the part of residents, more than two-thirds of these buildings were demolished during
the first two decades of the reform and opening era that began in the early 1990s in Shanghai.
Efforts to protect the remaining buildings in the 1990s came as a result of a few pivotal moments.
First, local academics became concerned that the intrinsic Shanghainese identity would be lost with
the disappearance of these symbolic buildings. These were academics who pride themselves on having
formed a unique cosmopolitan identity through absorbing diverse foreign cultural elements (Bergère
2009). Second, there came the remarkable success of the high-end and low-rise commercial Xintiandi
district that made use of the old structures as its selling point.5
Today, private entrepreneurs and the public sector alike are investing heavily in these old structures
because of their rarity and the perception that they constitute part of the city’s cultural capital (Shao
and Ruan 2003; Yung et al. 2014; Zhang 2001, 2015). While some residents voluntarily move else-
where in exchange for compensation to give up their home for redevelopment, many stay put. Among
them, there are those who do not believe that they have been offered the good price and those who do
not move because they relish the lilong’s sense of community. The local neighbourhood committee
(juweiuhui) of such a prime real estate area in the middle of the city plays a limited role in providing
services and governing the movement and sentiments of residents; hence, the residents resort to their
own methods and techniques to maintain their status and livelihoods (Pan 2002).

The past as cultural capital

By having a tenant like Old Tiger who understood the global hierarchy of value and the benefits that
it could bring, the landlord could not only triple his income by basing his rent on the year-to-year
profitability of Old Tiger’s business, but also keep telling his narrative about the importance of his
building according to the logic of the historic preservation programme of the municipal government
of Shanghai. Historic preservation, then, had a double meaning for the residents. For one, it entailed
a definite path to not losing a house to what the residents see as unjust processes caused by the use of
eminent domain. In addition, it is also a way for them to enhance their economic livelihood through
renting ‘a place with stories’ to those who could benefit from such place-based cultural capital. Here
we see another form of traditionalism mobilised as a form of capital that Pierre Bourdieu (1986) calls
‘cultural capital.’ Extending Karl Marx’s idea of capital ([1885]1990) beyond the economic and into
the symbolic realm of culture, Bourdieu refers to this particular concept of capital as the collection
of symbolic elements like skills, tastes, credentials, and material belongings that a person deliberately
acquires so as to become a member of a particular social class. In this case, Old Tiger was using a
rare heritage structure as cultural capital to reformulate his identity as a tea master with good taste.
Among the three forms of cultural capital that Bourdieu has outlined – embodied, objectified, and
institutionalised – Old Tiger’s traditionalism most closely resembles an objectified form of cultural
capital, as he deliberately used space to enhance the legitimacy of his teahouse as ‘authentic.’ In other
words, he created a ‘façade’ representing a perceived authentic Shanghai lifestyle; this, he believed,
would increase his credibility among the upper middle-class who formed his target customer base.
In an attempt to make sense of the relationship between gentrification and heritage, I have looked
at some of the ways in which local residents in Shanghai have pragmatically dealt with not having
the leverage let alone the right to demand explanations or accountability from the local government.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 891

In Chinese cities, land and property ownership-related issues have the greatest impact on citizens
through housing. Local residents are by no means protected. Millions of them are constantly being
asked to move whenever the local government wants to appropriate the land or structures in which
they live (Erie 2012; Hess 2010; Ho 2013; Hsing 2010; Shao 2013; Shin 2013). One may argue that
such uncertainties relating to individual ownership of land and property have caused a great sense
of anxiety. Old Tiger’s landlord was a very good example of these strategies: strategically, he let his
tenant use his house for a reason that reinforced the discourse he had initiated to protect his interest.
The ethnographic evidence presented in this article highlights how the residents sought to reframe
the ‘cultural dimension’ of their homes, namely their historical importance, and turn that into cultural
capital they could exchange for financial capital. For instance, based on my own ethnographic findings
(e.g. Arkaraprasertkul 2013), many residents actively dug up historical details about their homes and
then used these stories to claim that their homes were important to the city and therefore that they
should receive more compensation in case they were asked to leave them (Arkaraprasertkul 2016c).
The majority of my informants were two kinds of residents: renter-residents who come and go, and
the long-term ‘original’ residents who use their buildings and rooms as sources of cash and cultural
capital. It is this second group of residents who understood the special value placed on historical arte-
facts brought about by the influx of the transnational middle-classes who were arriving in Shanghai to
work in the city as it became a regional centre. These ‘original’ residents added modern decor to the
historic narrative in order to present their houses as being of historical importance and yet furnished
with all modern conveniences. These residents mobilised the discourse of ‘authentic Shanghaineseness’
to benefit themselves; this, in turn, produced a changed demography of the neighbourhood. Although
the debatable aspect of this scenario remains how ‘important’ these structures were, more and more
residents followed in the footsteps of the first successful storytellers in their attempt to capitalise on
their buildings and maximise their income.
I use the term ‘gentrification’ because in order to maintain their livelihoods, residents have made
their neighbourhood more middle-class, altering its socioeconomic structure. ‘Middleclassification’
(zhongcan jieji hua) is the closest translation of the term gentrification in Mandarin Chinese.6 This
paper has shown how the ‘original’ residents use the architectural uniqueness of an urban heritage
neighbourhood to enhance their cultural capital in the eyes of outsiders. By understanding how these
residents pragmatically subscribe to and readapt the newly acquired global hierarchy of value and
mobilise knowledge of this particular selling point to their advantage, I have presented a case study
exemplifying an active urban process in which these residents themselves are key actors in a differ-
ent kind of social change that, contrary to the commonly portrayed consequences of gentrification,
makes the neighbourhood more diverse, wealthy, and livelier without any intervention by the local
government or real estate developers.

Conclusion
What happens when locals see their old buildings become something of historic importance for out-
siders? There are both functional and symbolic reasons for this process. The structure of crisscrossed
low-rise lanes connected to the main streets in central locations is both pleasant to live in and socially
viable. Even Old Tiger, who rented an apartment outside of the Tranquil Light, said that he would like
to live in the Tranquil Light himself if he could afford it:
There’re many neighbours whom you are obliged to greet when you run into them in the lane and the close
proximity of row houses either adjacent or across from each other in the lanes makes it hard to keep your privacy.
That said, there’s a charm to this kind of living. You don’t have to wait to get on an elevator just to go to your
room or come down for some fresh air. You can also easily ask your neighbours to help you to watch things when
you aren’t there. It’s a pleasant feeling.
According to the basic economics of supply and demand, there is a high price to be paid to live in a
low-rise centrally located neighbourhood. Keeping a low-rise medium density neighbourhood in such
places is a direct way to restrict the supply of real estate that in turn keeps the price of each unit high.
892 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

An economist (e.g. Glaeser 2011) would argue that an increase in this supply would lower the prices of
a popular area such as Tranquil Light. On the symbolic side, however, one might see the phenomenon
as simply being about the exoticization of a less economically developed place. Nonetheless, boasting
the world’s most extensive metro system and one of the world’s most advanced central business districts,
Shanghai is not considered less developed than any other major global city in terms of its economic and
physical infrastructure. Both Michael Thompson (1979) and Arjun Appadurai (1981) have reminded
us about how objects gain their value through their scarcity. Lack of abundance helps those who can
acquire these objects gain prestige in a community of collectors. It is precisely the rush toward urban
development, in addition to the already advanced urban image of Shanghai as the backdrop to the
lilong houses, that renders their existence even more ‘exoticizable.’ Both the rapid decrease in the
supply of this particular type of housing and their rarity make the lilong houses stand out from the
ubiquitous high-rise apartments around them. By living there, tenants can claim the embodiment of
resources that are socially valued thanks to their cultural importance, such as knowledge of rare crafts,
literature, and, of course, the art of traditional tea making (Doctoroff 2009; Law 2012).
In Shanghai, it may be fair to say that the heritagization of old edifices had led to a process of social
change akin to gentrification; but is the phenomenon in Shanghai that simple? The heritagization of
lilong houses has been facilitated by their sociocultural meaning (Lim 2006). What drives this process
is these houses’ unique architectural form and the central location – the two components of urban life
sought by middle-class residents with ‘good taste.’ So, like gentrification in the strictest sense of the
term, it is capital and cultural reproduction that fosters the process of heritagization (Herzfeld 2015);
without these there would be no demand leading to the effort to keep the lilong houses intact; this
eventually became the guiding narrative of the discourse on ‘authentic Shanghainese heritage’ (Ren
2014). It was these ‘gentries’ (shenshi) that found the lilong houses to be a hidden gem in the city and,
despite the brief history of the preservation of lilong houses in Shanghai, it was also these gentries
who eventually spearheaded the protection of the lilong structures. Reminding the municipal gov-
ernment of what it would lose by bulldozing these houses to make way for development, academics
and historians spearheading preservation were not able to get their voices heard when their argument
was purely based on academic appeals to nostalgia (Peh 2014). The heritagization process was only
spurred on when the market also began to work with them.
The other important variable are the local residents. ‘Classic gentrification’ (Glass 1964) entails a
series of physical and socio-economic changes occurring as a result of the resettlement of residents
with higher incomes that often makes it impossible for the original residents to afford to live in the
same neighbourhood. This ‘gentrification from within’ (Arkaraprasertkul 2016b) as I would like to
call it, does not exclude the original residents. In fact, those residents still have a firm hold on their
property rights and are making sure that the direction of the change benefits them. Gentrification
from within in Shanghai is an unorthodox process resulting in citizens’ attempts to maximise their
sense of certainty. This process begins with those local residents who are economically aware enough
to keep their options open but also culturally adept in understanding how to maximise the return on
their property by claiming cultural capital through the globally-generated and locally-perpetuated
discourse of heritage.
The sense of economic precariousness among the original residents has had a discrete impact on
their changing sense of place-attachment. In the cases discussed in this paper, even the people who
are sentimentally attached to the neighbourhood gradually came to accept the fact that they would
have to think like their economically-minded neighbours if they did not want to be left out or left high
and dry in the process of social change. Although there were never threats of eviction, the residents of
Tranquil Light were aware of other threats, such as eminent domain. Therefore, they were never certain
about how much longer they would continue to be allowed to live in Tranquil Light. What they could
be certain about was their ability to make use of such remaining time to maximise their profits. This
awareness of what these residents were certain and uncertain about has gradually replaced the old
sense of place-attachment (see also Pan 2011). The seemingly gentrified facade of Tranquil Light was
the product of more than half of the original residents securing their sense of certainty this way. As the
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 893

ownership of the property stays with the original residents who move out, the new residents are only
‘gentrifiers’ in so far as they are bringing to the neighbourhood economic activities that are suited to
middle-class tastes. Finally, in light of the physical mobility of residents, we need to re-think policies
on property, relocation, and historic preservation so that they are not dictated by a misleading and
ossified traditionalism. In other words, the question of ‘heritage for whom’ needs to be addressed by all
parties involved. It would be difficult to see how liveability, livelihood and sense of a place can be sus-
tained solely by seasonal tenants and ‘AirBnB-typed’ of tourism and visitor’s economy. Some buildings
may become heritage simply because their residents are keen to derive financial gains with or without
knowing that they are creating a gentrification chain reaction. Recognising the critical importance of
the inevitability of the change brought about by the increasing demand as a result of rapid urbanisation,
I do not simply advocate for the preservation of local lifestyle, but rather a balance between adapting
to the change and preserving the existing ways of life. Rent will continue to rise and those who do
not have the means to own or operate their business will be pushed out of lilong. Nevertheless, to
maintain the sense of a place, it is essential to maintain some sense of continuity, diversity, and cultural
vitality. There is a limit that the locals themselves can do to respond to the challenge of social change
but supportive public policies from the local government can also be useful to providing some local
residents the option to ‘opt-out’ from heritagizing their homes for financial benefits.

Notes
1. 
Some call the lilongs ‘nongtang’ referring not to the architecture but to the public domain of the lanes on which
these houses are located.
2. 
This may seem precarious to many readers. A thorough explanation of what the rules are about renting the
apartments and what happens when renters make large investments like Old Tiger, if he were evicted and what
happens to his investment are available in a chapter called ‘The abrupt rise (and fall) of creative entrepreneurs:
socio-economic change, the visitor economy and social conflict in a traditional neighbourhood of Shanghai’
(Arkaraprasertkul 2016a).
3. 
The British established the first treaty ports in China at the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842. In
addition to Shanghai, these treaty ports included ‘Canton’ (Guangzhou in Mandarin), Ningbo, Fuzhou, and
‘Amoy’ (Xiamen in Mandarin).
4. 
It is worthwhile noting that, according to my conversations with local residents, the lack of appreciation of the
historical significance of foreign-looking buildings in China may be due to their being seen as signs of China’s
weakness in the face of the colonial powers during the late Qing dynasty.
5. 
For how this commercial district came to exemplify contemporary Shanghai and its social injustice, see Shao
(2013).
An alternative translation is shenshihua, or literally the process of becoming a gentry, which has gradually become
6. 
a widely used term in various genres of academic literature. In this paper, I stick to zhongcan jieji hua for the
reason that it is the most common term in the fields of human geography and anthropology focusing on China.

Acknowledgements
In addition to two anonymous reviewers of this special issue, this paper greatly benefited from the careful reading of
John Crespi, Chiara De Cesari, Rozita Dimova, Michael Herzfeld, Alex Nelson, and Leo Pang. Multiple versions and
drafts of this paper have greatly benefitted from constructive comments I received at the Land Ownership and Conflict
in a Global Context: Transfer, Adaptation and Translation of Normative Systems: An International Workshop at the Max
Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt; the International Lecture Series at the Department of Cultural
Heritage and Museology, Fudan University; Culture, Power and Practice Lecture Series at Melbourne University School
of Social and Political Sciences; the Anthropology Departmental Seminar at the University of Sydney; the Center for
Chinese Studies Lecture Series at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); Hong Kong Anthropological Society
Lecture Series at the Hong Kong Museum of History; and the International Lecture Series at the Graduate Institute
of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. I also want to thank the following colleagues for their feed-
back: Bradley Butterfield, Jin Chen, Jocelyn Chey, Ien Eng, Sunil Dubey, Matthew Gutmann, Ron Horvath, Weijie Hu,
Hsuan-Ying Huang, Paul James, Paul Jones, Arthur Kleinman, Xiangning Li, Sha Liu, Cameron Logan, Duanfang Lu,
Helen McKee, Donald McNiel, Janice Reid, Juan Francisco Salazar, Krishna K. Shrestha, Leslie Sklair, Luigi Tomba,
Ming Tong, Qin Shao, Jan Wampler, Emily Whewell, Jieyi Yang, and Xiaomei Zhao. The research leading to this paper
received funding support from the Global Perspectives on Society and Global Postdoctoral Fellowships from New York
894 N. ARKARAPRASERTKUL

University Shanghai, the Cora A. Du Bois Charitable Trust Anthropology Research Fellowship, the Fudan University
Fellowship, the China Scholarship Council (CSC) Research Scholarship, and the Harvard Asia Center Dissertation
Research Grant for Chinese Studies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by Harvard-Yenching Institute, New York University Shanghai (NYUSH) Global Perspectives
on Society Fellowship, China Scholarship Council (CSC) Research Scholarship, Cora A. Du Bois Charitable Trust
Anthropology Research Grant, Fudan University Centre for Studies of Chinese Civilization (ICSCC) Fellowship, Harvard
University Asia Center, New York University Shanghai (NYUSH) Global Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributor
Non Arkaraprasertkul is Visiting Professor at the Institute of the Middle and Far East at Jagiellonian University in
Kraków, Poland. Trained as an architect, urban designer, historian, and anthropologist, he conducts research on press-
ing social issues concerning contemporary Asian cities such as urban growth, heritagization, and mobility and mental
health. Owing to his eclectic background, his research approach includes both inquisitive ethnography and participatory
design thinking. He received his master’s degree in architecture and urban design Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), a master’s degree in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford, and a master’s degree and doctorate
in social anthropology from Harvard University. He previously held teaching and research positions in the US, China,
Thailand, and most recently in Australia as Senior Lecturer in Urbanism at the University of Sydney.

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