LIVING WITH THE FUTURE
 

Shanghai is a city in flux where all that is solid seems to melt into air, or rather into concrete, steel, glass and ever more high-rise towers which add attention-demanding verticality to an already overloaded skyline. The towers, globally understood symbols of the city's ambitions, coexist uneasily with a certain nostalgia for the built forms of the city's colonial past. Tabula rasa developments on a huge scale transform entire sections of the city into new business districts at the same time that they make a point in preserving or recreating pockets of historic spaces. At the street level, the Shanghainese understand that their city is changing rapidly and many express unease about the disorientating pace of restructuring and the surreal spatial juxtapositions that it produces. In contrast to the apparent cohesion of the Mao years, the recent social transformation of Shanghai has resulted in a more diverse urban society where inequalities are as deep and the possibility for conflict as present as they were during the period of the international settlement. Expatriates from the Asia Pacific region and the West, highly educated overseas Chinese and a surfacing immigrant population engaged in some niches of the city's service economy, all contribute to an increasingly complex and disjointed social landscape. No other group challenges the social order of Shanghai as much as Chinese internal migrants from rural areas, a "floating population" approaching 5 million with limited rights and vulnerable livelihoods. Poverty, low educational levels and the stigma of crime hinder the possibilities of incorporating this population into the social fabric of Shanghai. Developing a harmonious society in the city has become an official local public policy goal, one perhaps made more urgent by recent disturbances amongst disaffected migrant populations, and on the other hand, the central Chinese government's policy directing the city to continue absorbing rural migrants and turning them into urban citizens. Sharing responsibility for security in public spaces with the support of both institutions and local communities is nothing new for urban Chinese, schooled in a culture that emphasises a collective sense of responsibility and with the experience of decades of a tightly controlled social order. Nevertheless, these objectives may necessitate the broader cultivation of conditions and perceptions of "security" capable of engaging a wide range of the city's residents and a more profound understanding both of the nature of public spaces in a city in the midst of tidal change and of how these public spaces can contribute to a shared sense of community within the city.