“The contemporary office building provides a metaphor for the city. The way in which designers talk about strategic issues with clients who are in multiple places, and at the same time about short-term issues with end users, can offer a model of dealing with different timescales in a coherent and nested way. At the same time, rapid innovations in information technologies have weakened assumptions of co-location and synchronicity on which decisions are made concerning the supply of office space. There is an increasing need to think of offices as instruments for the development of ideas, for opening up possibilities, for generating wealth and for supporting businesses – instead of offices as commodities to be traded. Shanghai and other growing cities need to think not only how much office space but also what types of offices and how they are integrated into wider spatial structures and social fabrics.”
“The scale of economic development in Shanghai can be characterised by its massive labour force. Statistics show that the total number of employees in Shanghai was 8.13 million in 2003. This figure more than doubles the labour force in New York or London and it is also larger than Tokyo’s. More than half of these workers are employed in the services sector but also more than a third works in labour-intensive manufacturing industries. Growth at the top has meant an increase in international workers. Shanghai’s labour market also provides opportunities for low-skill workers and this is a key element to explain the attraction of a “floating population” of 5 million people to the city. All the various segments in the labour force are important to sustain economic development in Shanghai. Yet, this complex labour market with an increasingly polarised or dual structure has not been fully discussed in the existing plans for the city. Shanghai’s two-leg strategy is based on highly skilled services in the core area and labour-intensive manufacturing and traditional services in outer areas. This strategy may be causing a deepening spatial polarisation. The opportunities and challenges of polarisation in Shanghai deserve further research.”
“The urban economic transition in Shanghai is highly complex. Foremost, it has been extremely accelerated. What took one hundred years in other countries has been compressed to two decades here. Then, Shanghai faces the challenges of multiple simultaneous transitions: from a newly industrial economy to a knowledge-based service economy; from a state organised urban working system to a market driven urban labour market; and from a national centre reaching to global city status. Shanghai has always been China’s big manufacturing centre and, at its peak, this sector employed about 60% of Shanghai’s total workforce. Since the 1990s this share has declined to 40% while the share of services has grown from 30% in 1990 to 50% today. This tremendous transformation process is linked with the restructuring of state organised enterprises. Their downsizing, mergers, privatisation and outplacements have led to a decline in formal employment. As formal employment is directly linked with access to social insurance, you can imagine what this means in terms of contingencies, for the people and for the economy. Shanghai is confronted today with a multiplicity of working and living worlds that overlap in different forms in its urban spaces and districts. We only have to look outside of the window to see this complexity, this multiplicity of different working and living worlds. Now you could look on this superposed multiplicity as an incomplete modernisation but this, I think, would be missing the point. This multiplicity is a real asset: the diversity of working and living worlds can work as a thick pool of innovation, as an asset for economic and social adaptability. However, there are also risks of pulling apart these working and living worlds by an increase in inequality as there is a risk of pushing away the lower ends with stringent land-use regulations or by uncontrolled real estate development.”
“My relatively conservative forecast of Shanghai’s future growth indicates that annual double digit growth will continue until 2010, it will average 7% for the following 10 years and then stabilize at 3% for another 30 years. By 2020, Shanghai's gross geographic product will be 5 times bigger than now, equalling that of New York in 1997. By the year 2050, Shanghai's economic size will be 12 times bigger than now, an amount equal to the product of the whole of China in the year 2000. Policies by Shanghai’s government are designed to channel this growth so as to make Shanghai an advanced manufacturing centre, a centre of trade and transport, and an international finance centre. Its current weaknesses are the relatively low level of international connectivity of the city, the glass ceilings that small and medium enterprises face to growth and the limited participation that civil society has as a stake-holder in the economic development process.”
