The Shanghai Model

Speaker: Dr. Gregory Bracken, IIAS affiliated fellow

This research examines the field of twenty-first-century urbanism and asks if instead of planning at the national or regional level we should not be starting to plan at the international level? The nation state is beginning to lose its relevance, coming under attack from the forces of global capitalism, increasingly federalist authorities, like the EU, and the burgeoning importance of the city region, areas such as the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and Shanghai in China. For the first time in history more than fifty percent of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. The urban environment itself embraces a huge range of characteristics, from the sleepy suburb to the glittering global CBD, but that is not what is at issue here, what is being examined in this research is how these different urban environments interact with one another. Perhaps it is time to organise this interaction? Establish a network of global cities that would have more in common with each other than their hinterlands in the nation state?

The history of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Foreign Concessions might point the way to how this could be achieved. We are already beginning to see an increase in Concession-like activity by China across its borders (even as far away as Africa); it has also of course long been a distinctive feature of Western capitalism. Taking Shanghai, with the historic wealth and importance of that city in the colonial-era, might well be a useful point of departure. Shanghai operated three separate jurisdictions and yet ran itself as a seamless whole for the purpose of making money. It was a pluralist, dynamic, cosmopolitan and wealthy city (it was also of course dirty, depraved and unequal – all problems that this research intends to address).

In an increasingly globalised and urbanised world, bilateral relations are going to be between cities (and their larger city-regions) and not necessarily between nation states. We should be planning for this, not simply waiting to react when it happens. As a system this global network is not such an unusual idea, it had a precedent in the Hanseatic League, the Medieval union of North-European cities – what is new about this idea is its application to the global scale.