Public space is a topic of great interest for urban scholars and urban planners. Such space, like parks, sidewalks, and plazas, it is argued, can provide the common grounds where the inhabitants of a city meet, exchange ideas, even engage in a variety of cultural performances. This article reports on fieldwork about the use of public space in Shanghai today. We find a great diversity of uses, ranging from vendors who sell their wares to people who engage in heated and extensive political discussions to performers of Beijing opera and ballroom dancing. We also find that the local authorities use a light, and sometimes covert, hand in their oversight of inhabitants in such spaces. Finally, we discover that powerful social differences and inequalities between native inhabitants and working-class migrants, which have emerged during the period of economic reform and market transition, are now actively in evidence in the quality and use of public space in Shanghai. The article puts these findings within a broader theoretical context, concluding in the end that for many-though not all-inhabitants public man is alive and well in Shanghai.This is a study of public space in Shanghai, China. Public space and how it is used has become a topic of growing interest among scholars in the United States and elsewhere in the West. For many scholars such space represents something essential to the proper workings of cities. If such space is actively used by the residents of a place, and if they are able to engage with one another socially as well as politically, then, so the argument goes, the city, or community, of which they are a part will be a vibrant, indeed, even a fundamentally democratic site. Conversely, if such space is not used actively by the residents-indeed if as some argue there are growing constraints on the availability and use of such spaces-then the integrity, perhaps even broad viability, of the larger social order itself is drawn into question. At its strongest, this last point of view takes the form of a "decline of community" thesis, an argument that can be found in various scholarly writings today.
