Performing Community in the Lilong among the Long-time Residents of Two Shanghai Neighborhoods (2015)

Undergraduates: Chang Zhao, Isaac Warshauer

Faculty Advisor: Donald Nonini
Department: Anthropology

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Shanghai's traditional neighborhoods, lilong, are known for their vibrant public life in semi-public alleys. We studied two of these neighborhoods--Bugao Li and Xingye Li--in order to understand how community is perceived and performed by long-time residents in the presence of growing numbers of migrant workers. Shanghai, as a flagship city within China, has been growing at an incredible rate over the past two decades, and essential to that growth have been migrant workers--people from other provinces who have flocked to Shanghai for low-paying employment. Many of these workers have settled in the old lilong, which offer cheap housing close to center-city employment. Through interviews with long-time residents and observation of alley activities, we found that long-time residents have conceptualized themselves as a community in opposition to migrant workers, who they associate with uncomfortable changes to Shanghai and their neighborhoods. This sense of community seemed pervasive among these residents in both neighborhoods, but we found that the performance of this community, in the form of social gatherings, depended on alley conditions and was encouraged by wider alleys and greater foot traffic