Project Rationale — jyh.works

Drifting Grounds: Art, Autonomy, and the Soft Edge of the City

Strategic Intervention
Shanghai, China
Fall 2025 Thesis
Advised by Emma Silverblatt & Jose Castillo
Independent Project

Shanghai has always been a city I tried to understand, but never quite could, In just three decades, entire districts were planned, approved, and constructed with breathtaking speed. It felt like the city had materialized overnight. But while this transformation is often celebrated as a triumph of modern development, my experience of it has always been more conflicted: awe mixed with unease, pride shadowed by loss.

The official story of Shanghai’s growth is one of efficiency and ambition. But another story – more fractured, quieter, and at times, erased – runs alongside it. The speed of change flattened not only old buildings but the communities and cultures that once animated them. Historic neighborhoods were walled off and demolished within days, their residents relocated and dispersed. This top-down model of urbanization, defined by state-led planning and singular visions of progress, left little room for the subtleties of lived experience. Meanwhile, the tightly knit nongtang communities – with their alleyways, shared courtyards, and collective rhythms – represented a more bottom-up, informal mode of urban life. These spaces weren’t part of the future Shanghai imagined by planners, so they were cleared, paved over, and replaced with sanitized, homogenous versions of “modernity.”

But not everything disappeared. In the cracks of these rapid transformations, spaces emerged that defied easy categorization. Artist enclaves like M50 in Shanghai or 798 in Beijing were born not out of official mandate but through grassroots occupation and adaptation. These were urban leftovers; old factories, abandoned lots – reimagined into zones of creativity, resistance, and community. They embodied an alternative form of authorship, where the city wasn’t imposed from above but crafted from below.

This thesis is a response to that tension. It begins with the belief that architecture is not neutral. It can either reinforce dominant systems or help carve out space for those left behind. In exploring the collision between top-down urban planning and bottom-up cultural production, this project asks: How can architecture operate in the gaps of the system? How can we support informal, resilient communities not by designing for them, but with them, or at the very least, around them? In a city constantly reinventing itself, what would it mean to design for survival, not spectacle?