弄堂里 Lòngtáng li — In the Lane

Two hundred thousand lanes, and what happened to them

The 弄堂 is the form Shanghai took when it grew, and understanding it explains most of what the city looks like. From the 1860s the foreign concessions filled with terraced lane housing built to a pattern: a stone gateway — 石库门, literally stone-framed gate — opening onto a lane, with two-storey houses on both sides, a shared lane for cooking, washing, talking and children, and a small back room over the kitchen called the 亭子间. At its height this was where the great majority of Shanghai's population lived, several families to a house, and it produced a particular kind of urban life: no privacy, no separation between home and street, and everybody in your business. The 亭子间 in particular has a literary reputation, because it was what a young writer could afford — a whole genre of 1930s Shanghai writing is called 亭子间文学. Most of it is gone. Shanghai demolished lane housing on an enormous scale from the 1990s onwards, replacing it with towers, and the arithmetic was not simply greed: the houses had shared toilets or none, no heating, wiring from the 1930s, and families who had waited decades for somewhere with a bathroom. Relocation compensation made some households wealthy and left others far from where they had lived and worked. This is genuinely argued about in China, and both halves of the argument are serious — one side pointing at the loss of a unique urban fabric and of the street life that went with it, the other at what it was actually like to raise children in a room with no plumbing. What survives does so in three ways, and they are easy to tell apart. Some lanes are protected and still lived in, which is what 苏小雨 is photographing: laundry overhead, bicycles, somebody cooking in the lane, and residents who will tell you to mind the vegetables. Some have been restored commercially — Xintiandi is the famous case — where the façades are 石库门 and the insides are bars and shops, which is pleasant, well done, and not a neighbourhood. And a few are museums. If you want to see the real thing, the protected residential lanes off Shaanxi South Road, Jianguo West Road and the streets around Tianzifang are the places to walk, in the early evening, slowly. A word on how to behave, since this dialogue is partly about that. A lived-in 弄堂 is somebody's home and hallway at once. Walking in is generally accepted; photographing people without asking is not, any more than it would be in your own street. 苏小雨's 别踩到人家的菜 is the whole etiquette in five words — the pots by the doorway are a garden, the drying racks are a kitchen, and 可以拍您吗？ takes two seconds and usually gets a yes.