The ‘alleyway house’, or the often-referred lilong in Chinese, is undoubtedly the most cherished housing type in Shanghai for not only witnessing the city’s vicissitudinary modern history but also quintessentially representing its distinct urban identity as where East and West meets. Different from Beijing or other older neighboring metropolises in the Yangtze River region like Nanjing and Suzhou rich in historical heritage, Shanghai is a relatively young city with few ancient architectural legacies of China’s millennia-old history to take pride in. Instead, Shanghai is all about the idea of modern. Its uniqueness and prestige originate from its exceptional history of being a treaty port in the mid-19th century, where foreign concessions and Chinese governance unusually coexisted due to the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) after the nation’s humiliating defeat in the First Opium War.[1]

Neither a colony ruled by imperial powers nor a fully sovereign Chinese territory, Shanghai was an intermediate zone where Eastern and Western influences converged, collided but eventually achieved a harmony unseen in any other Asian cities.[2] Compared to the occidental appearance of the Bund, which reflects Shanghai’s westernization during the quasi-colonial period, and the futuristic skyline of the Pudong Lujiazui, showcasing the rapid modernization achieved over the last forty years economic reform, the alleyway house—with its design merging the typology of British terraced house with the traditional Chinese courtyard home[3]—specifically speaks for Shanghai’s hybrid nature.

Resembling the English townhouse formation but in a condensed size and scale, this new residential typology was originally designed as a series of narrow-width houses joined by common sidewalls, typically two or three stories high with European decoration details. Within it, smaller alleys branch out from the main alleyway between different sets of joined units, providing access, light and ventilation.[4] However, instead of building on the sides of main roads with traffic, these row houses would rather run along a main alleyway around four to five meters wide, attached perpendicularly to a main street inside a gated neighborhood with limited access. This purposeful separation of housing compound from the public domain corresponds to the enclosed nature of traditional Chinese courtyard houses.[5]

Once dominated three-quarters of the city landscape and housing at least 70% to 80% of the population from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century,[6] this residential type’s significance extends into historical and cultural dimensions. More than embodying foreign domination, its birth was rather a compromise to the ground-situation to accommodate the dramatic influx of Chinese refugees and serve the interests of foreign real estate speculator.[7] It marked the end of the segregation between Chinese and Westerners under the 1843 Land Regulation,[8] signifying the inexorable blending of the two forces during that transformative era. Forming the most common social living space for ordinary people in Shanghai, it also closely ties to their everyday lives. The alleyway house neighborhood holds a value also beyond its residential function, being also a place for working, socializing, entertainment, and conducting most daily transactions ‘—in short, the neighborhood was the city to these people.’[9]

However, despite Shanghai lilong’s role in anchoring the city’s distinctive cultural identity, it is still primarily appreciated as an urban heritage, with its decorative style, building typology, and spatial composition being the main focus. Such works have provided concrete evidence persuading the municipal government to preserve lilong neighborhoods through legislation. It has successfully saved many of them from rapid urban renewal in the early 21st century, preventing their replacement by residential high-rises and office buildings. Yet, as lilong residents’ contribution in creating, developing, and sustaining the unique neighborhood culture that breathes life into this heritage are often overlooked in most architectural studies, the rejuvenation of aging lilongs frequently leads to the displacement of these former residents. While they resettle in suburban apartments or other areas, they carry along with them not only their general personal memories or family history but also the particular undocumented stories of lilong houses which the generalized grand narrative has failed to capture.

Therefore, instead of following the current studies of Shanghai alleyway houses—which focus on typological analysis, renewal strategies, and heritage preservation—this dissertation takes a different path. It reads this from a social and cultural aspect through the term ‘longtang’, a name used by native Shanghainese to refer both to the physical building and the neighborhood in everyday life, to picture out the richness and diversity of this vanishing urban vernacular from a personal perspective based on the lived experience of four women in my maternal family. Through interviewing grandma Mo (91), Aunt Chen Jin (71), and my mother Ling (53), and collecting anecdotes of the family’s mysterious matriarch, Great-grandmother Yinhua (1900-1983) who led the family put down a root in the city (Fig. 1), this memory-based research centered on Xingye Fang,[10] the longtang they all inhabited, attempts to illustrate a heterogenous story underrepresented in the existing narratives (Fig. 2).

At first sight, the chosen site and the participants’ backgrounds and the time span their memories cover all seem to represent a set of ‘exceptions.’ For instance, instead of being set in a lilong with the iconic Shikumen motif,[11] my family’s story unfolded in an extra-settlement longtang called Xingye Fang attached to Shanyin Road in the Hongkou district. It is a small-scale neighborhood with 72 housing units built along one main alleyway,[12] beyond the boundaries of western concessions where most attention was paid. It is austere, without any eye-catching exotic arches or decorative pilasters. Located in a residential area known for having several celebrities’ former residences and exhibiting architectural diversity, it held even less architectural and cultural significance attracting local scholars. In fact, all the exceptionalities represented essentially come from their ordinariness.

On the one hand, coming from a working-class background distinct from most of their white-collar and upper-middle-class neighbors, my relatives’ resettlement in Xingye Fang—originating from Great-grandmother’s spatial mobility—reflects the dynamics often overlooked in conventional portrayals of this community as being predominantly literati-based. On the other hand, it also epitomizes the class mixing took place in many other affluent communities in inner Shanghai after 1949, as a result of the Communist Party’s endeavor to address housing shortage and wealth disparity.[13] As all characters in the dissertation are women, their stories can reflect the gradual transition in female occupation that synchronized with the enhanced notion of gender equality. Equally, this female-dominated family history can also be read as a simple contingency not necessarily standing for all. This immigrant city’s diverse demographic structure and complex sociopolitical setting ensure that no two longtangs are alike; therefore, this research, grounded in the subjectivity and specificity of its methodology, intends to illuminate the social and cultural nuances within this urban vernacular.

Furthermore, by using the intergenerational memories of these four women as the main research materials with additional photographs taken during my visit in May 2024, a transformation in the longtang life resulting from the changes in city’s economic and political landscape can be detected. These changes are primarily located by this research in three living spheres that constitute the social space of the longtang—the main alleyway, the housing unit where several households reside, and the individual room occupied by each family. In these spaces sequenced from semi-public, semi-private to private, one can sense the unfaded theme of sharing permeating almost every aspect of daily life.

Indeed, in view of the historical development of lilong architecture, the sharing of space has always been a norm of life. According to the housing report issued in 1937 by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC)—the most senior governing body in the International Settlement, among the 110,000 households surveyed, 87.4% were sharing the lilong houses with others, with three to six families and residents around 24 residents in one house being the most usual scenario.[14] However, sharing in the longtang is never solely about space. The life of Xingye Fang, pieced together from my family’s memories, reveals that it also involves the sharing of knowledge, information, and time. This essence of longtang life, deeply connected to the housing typology, fundamentally nurtures caring neighborliness in Shanghai longtangs and fosters a collective identity among residents through the accumulation of time.