University of Heidelberg

Workshop Sessions and Abstracts

Introduction

Session I: Cosmopolitan Childhoods

Session II: Growing Old: public and private spaces of ageing

Session III: Visualizing Urban Futures

Session IV: Alternative Youth Cultures

Session V: Place-making and inter-generational practices of migration

Session VI: Youth, Aging and the Female Body

Introduction

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Metaphors of Age and the Image of a Metropolis

Shanghai, like many other cities, including Delhi, has sometimes been spoken of as divided into “new” and “old” parts. It has also, at some times, been associated with vitality, at others with decay. And it has occasionally been thought of as holding special appeal for people who are, literally, youthful. This paper will explore the way that images associated with youth and age, the old and the new, death and rebirth have made their way into discussions of Shanghai at selected points during the last century and a half. It will be asked how this has been expressed in terms of geography (new versus old districts), politically (a theme particularly important around 1949, as the city was spoken of as taking on a novel form to match the founding of the PRC), and socially.  One question to be explored is how visions of Shanghai as youthful or new fit in with ideas of it being futuristic, offering a window onto what is to come, either for China (a notion that took hold around 1900) or for the world (a notion that took hold about a century later).

Session I: Cosmopolitan childhoods

James Farrer & Anna Greenspan
Raising Cosmopolitans: Expatriate Families Navigating Shanghai's Local Schools

Drawn by the booming Chinese economy, the number of short-term foreign visitors, sojourners and long-term settlers has expanded to more than 200,000 (long-term and short-term) residents in the city at any given time. The diversity of residents has also increased, as have their strategies for childrearing and education while in Shanghai. Unlike an older model of education focusing on reintegration into the home society, most European and American parents in Shanghai aspire to raise a cosmopolitan child – culturally Western and competent in Chinese culture and language. Based on our qualitative interview research there are significant challenges to this cosmopolitan dream. International school tuitions run close to US $30,000 a year, and rarely provide anything but a superficial exposure to Chinese language and culture. For expatriate families with no corporate educational subsidy, international schools may not be an option. Out of financial necessity and a desire to expose their children more deeply to Chinese language and culture, some foreign parents are experimenting with sending their kids to local public or private Chinese schools. Local schools present daunting obstacles to foreign students: lack of language support, competitive pressures, formidable homework assignments, and political indoctrination. In addition to the practical difficulties, local Chinese schools effectively test the boundaries of parents’ own cosmopolitan commitments, including the desire to protect their children from the harshness of China’s competitive schooling system while at the same time preparing them for competition in a world in which China will be increasingly important.

Marie Sander
Staging youth culture: Expat teens in Shanghai

This paper contributes to the newly emerging field of research on privileged migration by providing new insights into specific age-related experiences of mobile lifestyles, such as belonging and integration. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork in Shanghai in 2010/2011 and particularly focuses on international teenagers’ interactions with the city. As a case study on expatriate youth in Shanghai, it examines the everyday experiences of teenagers who try to establish their new temporary home among international schools, privileged housing areas, Chinese culture and nightlife spaces. It firstly draws a detailed picture of their perception of mega-city Shanghai by examining their narratives of arriving and adjusting to the city and by paying attention to the role of sensories in dealing with the new urban environment. Secondly, it takes a close look at the teenagers’ nightlife activities. Understanding these as key aspects of their identification with the city, it becomes clear how nightlife spaces not only offer an opportunity to interact with the city, but also provide a stage for the performance of aspiring urban cosmopolitan identities.

Session II: Growing old: public and private spaces of ageing

Bianca Brijnath
Alzheimer’s and the Indian Appetite

Activities such as cooking, feeding and eating speak to the pleasures and difficulties of caring for a person with dementia. Using ethnographic data from Delhi, this paper will show how food is central to care giving practices and shapes understandings of gender, ageing, intergenerational care, and love. A sensory anthropology explicating bodily experiences of food, eating and care is juxtaposed against the socio-political contexts where feeding and eating occur “off the body” within kinship relations and wider forces of starvation and inequity. I argue that food cooked within the home is part of the disciplinary project of care enacted both on care-giver and care-receiver. As long as the person with dementia eats, the work of surveillance, everyday routine and bodily containment is ongoing. This involves relations of power and citizenship which affect both the carer and the person with dementia. But when the person with dementia stops eating anxieties ensue around hunger and wasting and these anxieties in turn are linked to experienced or imagined loss, famine, deprivation and hunger.

Xiufeng Zhang
Community schools as means to everyday life for the retired in Shanghai

This presentation will introduce the pilot research of my doctoral study on contemporary urbanism of Shanghai. With the state-led economic reform, the work units (Danwei) system that was embedded in the planned economy has declined. “Community construction” is the alternative urban governance mode in the new century that emphasizes not only public service on the community level but also the state’s control in the urban area. Against this background, community schools are established as part of the community construction policy, which was originally designed to promote adult education for the unemployed and to encourage an ideological role in urban leisure life. The schools are financed and managed by corresponding administration departments; they offer short term courses on technology, culture, arts, sports and other practical knowledge with free or a low charge. As my observation in Shanghai confirms, community schools are very welcomed by the retired residents who have enough time and interests in leisure activities in the community. Furthermore, based on the courses that are usually conducted by part-time or volunteer teachers, various self-organized hobby groups/teams have gradually appeared in many neighborhoods. In this, the institutional setting has unintentionally changed social relationships, organizational forms and everyday life in urban communities, especially for  middle-aged and elderly residents.

Session III: Visualising urban futures

Julian Worrall
Youth, Age, and Urban Space in Contemporary Tokyo

Contemporary Tokyo is produced and consumed in distinctive sites and patterns according to age. A panoply of youth-oriented images, lifestyles, and communities map onto a diverse topography of urban places in central Tokyo. Harajuku and Aoyama trace out the intersection between global and local fashion scenes; Akihabara emerges as the physical analogue of virtual otaku networks mediated by anime and computer games; Koenji forms the nexus of a vigorous alternative music and politics; Roppongi provides landing sites for global capital and its managers. Meanwhile, the increasing numbers of an aging yet active cohort trace out another topography of sites and pathways in the city. Urban redevelopment projects reconstruct heritage talismans in the form of replicas of long-absent buildings from the 19th century. Groups of elderly people devoted to walking and photographing the city are numerous, as are media catering to this market. Suburban residential land is subdivided repeatedly with each generation, resulting in a distinctive pattern of compact houses. These divergent topographies overlap and intersect at certain sites – train stations, shopping streets, parks, festivals – as public spaces of interaction and exchange. Drawing on the places and cases given above, this presentation will map and explore various linkages between age and urban space in contemporary Tokyo, before lengthening the view to consider the prospects for the city’s future under an aging society, and widening it to invite comparisons with other metropoles in the region.

Arunava Dasgupta
Students as Citizen Designers: Re-defining personal engagement within design studio experiments in schools of architecture

In many ways, architectural design education programs in India have remained disconnected with current flows of society and time. Let alone performing leadership roles for professional and practice domains, architectural education has struggled to address changing conditions of societal and physical settings. The gap between practice and academia has grown to uncomfortable proportions resulting in widespread confusion in the minds of students, fresh graduates and young professionals. Design studio tutors in schools of architecture have continuously preferred “extra-ordinary” projects as studio initiatives revolving around large, iconic urban artifacts as the focal catalyst for academic exchange. Rarely has the studio program explored alternative trajectories of student experience and associated engagements with city space as the springing point of the studio exercise. The dilemma of nurturing the minds of today’s youth within such academic programs through such limited avenues of problem definition in the studio space gets reflected through increasing disenchantment of students during the progression of the academic calendar. Against the prevailing trends of a tutor generated, over-simplified, simulation of city conditions as the departure point of studio experiments in architecture schools, this paper argues for a learner centric, personal engagement with city space as the foundation for a citizen-designer exploration of our environments. Such a shift in studio-based creative disciplines like architecture could help reinforce student-city dialogues that not only shape the unique persona of the learner in the city but also extend opportunities for an individually driven, creative engagement of students as citizen designers defining their own context of application.

Victor Jinliao He & Ying Zhou
Youthful creative workers in Shanghai, a city which never gets old

Shanghai today confronts the problem of “growing old” in the context of an aging China on the one hand, while continuing to attract overseas, expat Chinese and local talent who are students, young workers, start-up entrepreneurs —making up a so-called “creative class”— on the other hand, as the city continues to develop as a global city with its historic cosmopolitanism and careening ahead economically. We present the argument that “Shanghai never gets old” by specifically looking at the creative workers and their role in the process of spatial production of the so-called creative clusters or parks. These creative clusters often re-use the historic industrial urban fabric of Shanghai and catalyze new forms of urban products which further attract the influx of these youthful workers. Through a joint presentation from disciplines of geography and architecture, we aim to examine how these youth-centered creative workers activate historic architecture and urban spaces, enabling Shanghai to maintain its “youth”.  Most crucial is to understand the interplay of the social-cultural context of a transforming global city with its city landscapes and imaginaries. The intersection of the global, in the formulation of a “creative class” and the deployment of heritage preservation for tourism to attract this class, with the local specificities of a cosmopolitan, mobile and worldly entrepreneurial class who have cultivated the habit of adapting the latest know-how, have simultaneously expedited the disappearance of a past that is at the same time marking a future of a particular kind of tradition. We propose these open questions for a wider discussion, asking how to promote inter-generational conversation through urban production, how to equilibrate conservation of tradition and representation of modernity, and to what extent the identity of Shanghainese will disappear or re-form into a new one. 

Aynne Kokas
Branding Chinese Childhood: 
International Theme Parks and Youth Media in Contemporary Shanghai

Scholar Stephanie Donald’s work on Shanghai as a “branded city” argues that the cultural perception and re-creation of a given urban space, particularly through images in films, television and theme parks, is significant in terms of how consumers consume those spaces (Donald and Gammack, 2007). An intriguing parallel phenomenon is the rise of children’s entertainment programming in places like the Jiangsu Kids Channel, and the SMG Kids Channel creating a huge market for youth media content which cannot be solely met by domestic providers. Though domestic producers can fulfill large portions of the demand for branded children’s entertainment, international industrial collaborations are taking an increasingly important role. Events like the International Family Film Festival in Los Angeles, sponsored by the China Children’s Film Association and the X: Media Lab in Suzhou create spaces of industrial exchange to facilitate partnerships in media creation between Chinese and Western companies while at the same time shaping the world that children consume through media. At the same time, theme parks like Disney Shanghai offer branded spaces within which children can re-consume international commercial media content. This paper will outline the different sites of international media exchange for the production of youth entertainment in Shanghai, while at the same time examining what these sites reveal about the international influences on Shanghai’s youth culture. Ultimately, the sites of youth international exchange in media production in Shanghai create a paradigm for a “branded” Shanghai youth experience, one with substantial implications for the city’s rapidly changing youth culture.

Session IV: Alternative youth cultures

Silvia Lindter
Transnational Makings of Internet Counterculture, Open Sharing and Alternate Worlds in Shanghai, China

Recent years have seen a rise in the formation of creative collectives across the U.S., Europe and Asia, committed to producing technologies and sharing knowledge in an open way. What these collectives have in common across the distinct local constituencies out of which they emerge, is a passion for, and commitment to, cross-disciplinary collaboration, open source sharing, and the re-making of software, hardware and urban infrastructures. I present findings from ethnographic research conducted in 2011 on the mobilization of such open sharing values in urban China and in relation to its particular political and cultural arrangements. In particular, my research focused on a collective of creative entrepreneurs and freelancers, who work in a co-working space in Shanghai, an international hub through which both Chinese and international “geeks” and “tech-like-minds” travel. What I found during this research was an internationally active world of designers, artists, developers, writers, hackers, venture capitalists and other independent doers, who are at the forefront of implementing not only new technologies but also social, cultural and economic shifts in China today. This new generation of cultural producers is at once complicit in on-going institutional transformations and passionate about building alternate spaces to subvert dominant narratives. They are creating new social and technological configurations for themselves, their nation and the IT world writ large. They are committed to values of free culture and open sharing, youth and Internet counterculture. I suggest that these practices of digital and semiotic makings are neither an example of a straight-forward up-take of Silicon Valley counterculture ideals in places elsewhere, nor are they stable nodes in a network of flows between global city centers. Rather, I explore what models of transnational citizenship are embedded in the Internet counterculture and maker imaginary and how the underlying material and discursive practices are expressed in a particular urban locale like Shanghai. I explore the following questions: who is involved in the project of making alternate worlds of working, learning and socializing in China? Who are China’s cultural producers today and what motivates their rhetoric of building a more open and free society for their nation? What role do new information technologies and social media play in their efforts, for their international collaborations and cultural productions?

Lisa Movius
Rebels to entertainers: the generational shifts of Shanghai rock musicians and audiences

In culturally conservative Shanghai, the makers and consumers of independent and alternative music have long been viewed with suspicion, as bad boys and bad influences. China’s first rock star to emerge in the 1980s, Shanghainese singer-songwriter Zhang Xing, was silenced by the accusations of “hooliganism”. Until 2001, the Chinese term for rock, “yaogun”, as well as longhaired men, were banned from Shanghai television and radio. For the 1970s-born, a career in music brought family shame and social ostracism, and enthusiasts of the genre encountered similar if smaller pressures. Rock was more than music, it was necessarily a lifestyle choice. However, the children of the 1980s grew up with the popular rock soundtracks like Black Panther and Cui Jian, Beijing artists that enjoyed mainstream success in the early 1990s, and the first little emperors also generally enjoyed much more open-minded parents. Young rockers’ parents would not kick them out of the house, but rather install practice rooms, have the band around for dinner, and take the extended family to cheer for them at concerts. Rock music became just one more sort of hobby to encourage, one more accomplishment to support. Rock also has become more mainstream and everyday for younger fans, an entertainment option with street cred rather than a dedicated lifestyle. Rock clubs and bands have proliferated on college campuses, and concert-going has become normalized as a regular pastime for students and young professionals; a pastime with friends or to find or take dates. The generational transition has transformed how independent, alternative and underground music interacts with its audiences, as well as with China’s larger socio-cultural terrain.

Session V: Place-making and inter-generational practices of migration

Sreejata Roy
Influences on Imageability

One of the strongest visual outcomes of contemporary neo-liberal political environments and economic policies that have catalyzed globalization on an unforeseen and unimaginable scale is the relentless mutation of metropolitan landscapes all over the world. Urban geographies are being rapidly and permanently transformed to accommodate the ever-expanding construction of skyscrapers, corporate offices and shopping malls. The traditionally public, historical and “green”, spaces in cities are encroached upon and appropriated, shrinking and disappearing as state property is sold and developed into commercial mega-projects for private business interests. And at the other end of the scale, cities themselves bloat into unsustainable entities via the influx of millions of impoverished rural migrants, who create their own precarious settlements, infrastructure and relational circuits in whatever corner they can find, tenaciously persisting against all odds and becoming permanent residents of the city over time and over generations. The migrant working class is also a subject to various powerful modes of alienation, even while the city enlarges these communities’ frames of reference, dismantles provincial and rural prejudices, offers a range of new affiliations and professions, and new possibilities of individual freedom. However, this new urban habitat (that is paradoxically both hostile and hospitable) of seductive modernity and burgeoning capital also functions as an arena for significant personal and collective expression for the migrant working class. It also functions as an interface that fosters human connectivity, ingenuity and the creation of crucial informal local networks that allow uprooted and displaced people to not only survive conditions of deprivation, but in fact to thrive. For the last five years my art practice has involved experimenting with new genres of art across different populations in various working-class localities in Delhi. My research focuses on the representation of social issues through works created in collaboration with the community and through direct interaction/intervention in the physical spaces of neighbourhoods. My practice engages with women, children and young adults in their own daily contexts, facilitating the genesis of artwork from within their living / working spaces, using low-cost local materials. I visualize collective projects that would serve as a voice for the community, inviting women, children and youth from different background to narrate their personal experiences of the changing urban milieu through a variety of creative media and art forms.

Lucie Wei
“Bar girls” in Shanghai

Despite Shanghai still being surrounded by polluted factories, the inner-city area has been rebuilt to be a heaven of consumption. The city suffers from rampant materialism. Meanwhile, in our daily life, we may encounter various types of workers with low wages such as service staff, nannies, hourly employees and cleaners, etc. Most of them are migrant workers but their life experience in the city is not so similar as is the case for factory workers. In this study, I will focus my attention upon young female service employees who I call the “bar girls” in the luxury entertainment industry, including night clubs or KTV venues where an obvious polarization exists at the work place itself between the upper class and the underclass. In my presentation I will ask: who is the bar girl? Is there any difference between working in a factory and in a bar? How does this work experience affect their values and self-identities? How do they face the pressure of life and what are their coping strategies? I will explore how family background, gender roles, the household registration system and mainstream discourse affect their desire to settle in Shanghai. In addition, if we focus on the labor market, we may need to question how labour production regimes work as they form distinctive characteristics in the service industry. The bar girls want to forget the past and build a new life in the city, but sometime the past will never pass. Studying this group of young women workers, we not only can observe the multiple aspects of labor in China, but we can also reflect upon the process of social structures and individuals’ motivation and resistance.

Vera Zambonelli
Never too young, not too old: Batuque na Cozinha at Que Bom

This presentation examines the relations between an ethnic restaurant, Que Bom, located in Asakusa, Tokyo, and its clientele. Que Bom, though a restaurant, does more than simply serve Brazilian food. Weekly, as to reinforce its being an ethnic restaurant, it hosts a variety of Brazilian themed events and programs. These programs and events cater to clients from all generations, such as, for example, the batuque na cozinha (literally drum something) event, where parents, who bring their children, young and less young people gather to participate in the ongoing drumming. Using videographic methodologies to document the clientele engagement with the space, this presentation aims to explain how and why Que Bom, though not branded as a family restaurant, has been able to create a familiar space that welcomes all age groups and thus allows for intercultural and intergenerational community placemaking.

Session VI: Youth, ageing and the female body

Melissa Butcher
Things Seen and Unseen: the politics of visibility and recognition in Delhi

There is much that is invisible in the story of “India Shining” and the urban transformation that represents it. The removal of poverty and the disappearing of “the middle class” behind residential gates, for example, has been well documented. But there are a myriad of small stories, hardly visible in the machinations of the city, whose narratives define liminal moments and interstitial spaces where social structures are made transparent, are challenged, redefined and reinforced. In their recitation, these stories become work that creates the city, underpinning or undermining its cosmopolitan nature. This paper will explore some of these stories in a series of vignettes of urban life in Delhi. Engaging, in particular, with the work of Young (1980) and Phadke et. al. (2009), it will focus on the body of the woman, both young and older bodies, and their relationship with the city. It will show how, whether in contesting position in the queue for rations, in attempts to hide the body under clothes or confine it to particular rooms, in the visibility of loose hair or loose draw strings, or in struggling with the inability to loiter, the body of the woman, its exposure and comportment, perceived as the bearer of tradition, can invert public and private space, and contest the shame that is the ordering framework of interactions within Delhi.

Tina Schilbach
Turning 30: Chinese women narrating gender and generation in a global Shanghai

Shanghai is often imagined as very feminine city, construed as an ensemble of fashionable style, elegant nostalgia and flamboyant consumption, in contrast to the harder, more political and masculine character of the capital city in the north. Urban reform has created many new spaces either designed for, and primarily frequented by women, and providing opportunities for highly visible participation in the city’s globalisation narrative. Though being fairly exclusive spaces of class and aspiration, they are also places in which women can feel welcome, safe and comfortable, and in which meaningful negotiations of gendered urban territory can occur. As both contrast and complement to the feminine image of the consumer, however, the productive energies of the city betray much more masculine connotations. Certainly, the corporate mentality of an aspiring global city is also a powerful storyline in the narration of successful biographies among middle-class women. Yet, such a narrative can never be as smooth and straightforward as it is in the case of their male peers. This presentation discusses Shanghai through the (inter-)generational stories of women among China’s “balinghou” generation, or those born after 1980. Though coming of age in China’s privileged urban environments since the late 1990s, with unprece¬dented opportunities for alternative lifestyle choices, middle-class balinghou upbringing has been relatively conservative and “non-experimental”. The gender-specific formats of Shanghai’s global-city storyline appear to reflect this transitional and fuzzy character of class in urban China today, where women are trying to make sense of a shifting field of class and gender and of the ambivalent landscape of social expectations and relationships this has generated. Between public and private ideals of middle-class practice, women’s voices on an aspirational class culture differ, and represent their search for ways to transform “their” Shanghai from an inviting, promising and safe urban space to a real place to call home.