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Documentary Reflections on Gentrification
Shanghai, China · Research · 2025
Historic streets in rapidly transforming cities face erasure. Yet some persist. Sipailou Road in Shanghai's Old Town remains a place where wet markets operate, elderly residents gather, and everyday life continues—even as luxury development surrounds it. This is not the absence of change, but the presence of resistance. A fragile, uneven resistance that shows gentrification is not total displacement, but an incomplete, contested process. This project documents that resistance through image and sound.
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PERSISTENCE IN PRESSURE Shanghai's Old Town transforms rapidly. Yet Sipailou Road persists. Markets still operate. Elderly residents still gather. Small shops remain. This project documents what endures when change presses from all sides—not through absence of threat, but through fragile, everyday continuity. Resistance is visible in routine.
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UNEVEN TRANSFORMATION Gentrification is not uniform. It arrives in waves, concentrates in pockets, leaves gaps. Sipailou Road sits within one of Shanghai's most tourist-dense zones, yet remains partially untouched. This project captures that unevenness: how some streets are remade while others adapt. How pressure and persistence coexist on a single block.
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ATMOSPHERE AS EVIDENCE Numbers cannot measure what makes a place itself. This project uses image and sound to document atmosphere: the rhythm of market vendors, light through narrow alleys, the presence of long-time residents. These are not nostalgic details but evidence of what is at stake when neighborhoods change.
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EVERYDAY RESISTANCE Resistance need not be organized or visible. It lives in the wet market that refuses to relocate. In the corner shop that serves the same customers for decades. In elderly neighbors who know each other's names. This project documents quiet, ordinary forms of persistence that challenge narratives of total erasure.
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THE INCOMPLETE CITY Cities are never finished. Neither are their transformations. Sipailou Road shows a city in negotiation with itself: between heritage and commerce, between local life and tourist gaze, between what was and what is becoming. This project documents that middle ground where most urban life actually happens.
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Documentary Reflections on Gentrification
Shanghai, China · Research · 2025
