Here at Shanghaiist, our intrigue with Thames Town, the British-themed residential area in Songjiang district, goes all the way back to 2006. But we haven't really been doing justice to the German Town located in Anting, 30 kilometres away from the city centre. Well, as it turns out, "Little Germany" isn't doing any better than its better known sibling. Yang Xifan of Der Spiegel has made a trip to the town, where she speaks to "Yu X", a real estate agent in the neighbourhood (who has a lot of time on her hands these days), as well as architect Johannes Dell, from Albert Speer & Partner, the firm that was hired to design the district. more ›

Chinese drivers, our heart goes out to you (when you're not trying to kill us on a daily basis). We know of the Book of Job-like struggles you face just to get your hands on a car, now one of the main face-maintaining/wife-snagging accoutrements in contemporary China. Import taxes and price markups are absurd: the starting cost of a 2011 BMW 650i Convertible in the United States begins at 550,880RMB ($85,550 USD), while the same car in China starts at 2,039,000RMB ($316,650 USD). more ›

Cue the sound of a needle being taken off a record: Putuo district planning officials just announced yesterday that the graffiti wall running along Suzhou creek on Moganshan Lu (莫干山路) next to the M50 Creative Garden will see the wrecking ball before year's end, as the area will be redeveloped for commercial purposes. more ›

Oh the humanity! Oh the travesty! Our dear Luwan will soon be no more thanks to a central government plan that was just passed yesterday. The new land mass, a merger of Huangpu and Luwan districts, will just be called Huangpu. more ›

Translation of captions:

OPPOSING THE SHANGHAI MAGLEV ONSTRUCTION PLAN: 10,000 RESIDENTS TAKE PART IN THE 'HARMONIOUS WALK' NEAR PEOPLE'S SQUARE more ›

You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen... Our city's foresighted urban planners, God bless their hearts, have looked into their glassball and decided that Shanghai needs another Lujiazui — and really, soon — in three years to be exact. Well if they were able to build Lujiazui I in ten years, we have every confidence they can build Lujiazui II in three. Never ever ever doubt the ambitions of Shanghai city planners. Just build first,... more ›

Time to take advantage of the start of the new academic year to learn something new at several upcoming events taking place here in Shanghai. more ›

Photo from Laurence Shan, and yes this photo is 483 days old! more ›

Hear ye! Hear ye! Tomorrow night, Brearley Architects and Urbanists will be hosting a special event with Roots & Shoots, the youth arm of the Jane Goodall Institute. more ›

Property agents in Shanghai have come up with a novel way of giving house buyers important information about the home they intend to buy. Ask them about neighbourhood construction plans for malls, motorways and high rise appartments and they may take you to the third floor of the Urban Planning Museum in People's Square. There lies the model of the grand plan of the city centre for Expo 2010. more ›

During this year's joint exhibition "Design Week" and "Sino-International Real Estate Summit" a seminar about New Public Space was held by FAR. This is a non-profit foundation to facilitate the communication and collaboration between architects in China and Shanghai. more ›

Today we came across The New York Times' latest installment of its "Frugal Traveler" series , and this time Matt Gross writes about our fair city of Shanghai. We will preface this post by saying it is an interesting and generally well-informed guide to spending a weekend in China, with good recommendations, although not much "off the beaten path." But, Shanghaiist wonders, does The New York Times know the meaning of the word "frugal?" more ›

Photo by 2dogs taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site. more ›

Don’t panic yet, but seriously, it might be inappropriate to say "Bund 18" in the future. According to this Eastday report (in Chinese), one of the 2006 government projects -- cleaning up the city's street names -- is going to be finished by the end of this year. There are 838 roads involved in this project: 146 road names are going to be written off, 154 road names are going to be changed and 225 road names are going to be prefixed. (We've checked the street names that will be written off and fortunately they are all in suburbs, like Qingpu, Fengxian and Baoshan) more ›

Shanghaiist headed out to the city government on Wednesday morning to check out what was happening with the housing protester folks, who go there every Wednesday to meet with officials in hopes of solving their cases. It's been several months since we last reported on these folks, and nothing much seems to have changed. There are still of plenty of pissed off people. Wary of making too much of an impression on the guards over there, we talked briefly with some people and then headed next door, to the Shanghai Urban Planning and Exhibition Center, where they opened the The Blacksmiths' Alchemy exhibition. In case you missed it, here's a blurb: more ›

Luigi Di Serio is an "entrepreneur" who does "ad hoc writing, website development and theorizing." He also has a degree in Urban Planning, which, we suppose, makes him vaguely qualified to rank the world's top skylines. Regardless, his list can serve as a good conversation starter. Four of his top 18 (and two of his top three) are in China: more ›

Shanghaiist headed over to Xujiahui Park last weekend to meet French artist Patricia Peides, who is visiting Shanghai to participate in the first Shanghai International Biennial Urban Sculpture Exhibition, part of the 2005 Shanghai Art Fair. more ›

Shanghaiist has just had the dubious pleasure of experiencing Guangzhou rush hour -- and even now, hours later, we still reek of eau de exhaust. So imagine how thrilled we were to hear that Dongtan (东滩) Chongming Island (崇明岛) right off Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River, is going to become the site of the world's first eco-city. Here's an excerpt from the press release. more ›

That's refreshing news. Not that Shanghaiist has anything in particular against Xintiandi. It's OK, in an Epcot Center sort of way. Maybe in 10 years or so, once the novelty wears off and the prices come down a bit, it will be a decent place to sit outside and have a beer. But we don't understand why we see so many red-hatted tour groups barrelling their way through the place, snapping photos. We don't understand why so many visitors are led to believe that there's anything old about the place at all. Xintiandi is not a neighborhood of restored old buildings. Old buildings were razed and residents were displaced to make way for Xintiandi. The same thing is happening now in the blocks that surround the Xintiandi area. The real estate is just too valuable. (And if the old neighborhoods must get chewed up and the old residents spit out, Shanghaiist would choose something that looks like Xintiandi as the lesser evil to get built in their place.) more ›