Architecture, tactics and mobility – Appropriating space at a transport hub in Shanghai

Abstract

Although public transport development has been widely addressed in extant urban research, everyday practices in transport spaces and their broader implications for urbanizing China are relatively less studied. Building on de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” and the literature on urban mobility, this study employs spatial analysis and ethnography to investigate the case of the Shanghainan Railway Station (SHNS) in China that had become underused after its traffic was directed away to new stations in the same network. By 2017, this decline had turned an architectural icon designed for efficiency and speed into a place where many unlikely social groups gathered daily. We followed a charity team serving the homeless seeking shelter there to understand how this modern structure was appropriated to cater to those who survived in the trails of development. The case of the SHNS reveals the uneven consequences of urbanization brought about by increasing connectivity in Chinese society and highlights how tactics can be a form of social infrastructure exhibiting degrees of institutional stability and translocal solidarities. It also points to the theoretical significance of turning our attention from the frontier to the trail of development as a productive space where the state, civil society and marginalized emerge temporarily in pastoral forms.