Course Review | Eating and Drinking in Shanghai: A Way of Seeing the City

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Introduction

This book, Eating and Drinking in Shanghai: A Method of Urban Observation, presents the outcomes of Core Design Studio 2, offered in Spring 2026 by the International Master's Program in Architecture at the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Taking everyday food and drink as its point of departure, the course seeks to reconsider the relationships among Shanghai's urban space, architectural form, and social life.

The course was jointly led by Assistant Research Professor Liu Naifei from the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and architects Wu Zhida and Wang Qihong from WWWorks. Each student selected a type of food or drink closely associated with life in Shanghai as a research thread. Through historical research, fieldwork, and architectural diagramming, they re-examined the distinctive urban character of Shanghai as reflected in its cultures of eating and drinking.

The course is structured around five main threads: coffee, wine, benbang cuisine, western cuisine, and sichuan cuisine.

Wine/Liquor – As an indispensable part of nightlife, it is closely entangled with Shanghai's modern lighting, streets, and entertainment spaces.

Western Dining – closely tied to Shanghai's history as a modern treaty-port city. In the contemporary era, Western restaurants have become intertwined with social media, urban check-in culture, and performative consumption, making them important spaces through which to understand contemporary lifestyles in Shanghai.

Benbang Cuisine – reflects the formation of Shanghai’s regional cultural identity, revealing the complex relationship between modernity and tradition, locality and urbanity.

Sichuan Cuisine – introduced to Shanghai through successive waves of migration, reflects the city’s ongoing interaction with other regions of China.

Coffee – Once a symbol of urban intellectual sociability in the Republican era; today it has become an integral part of the fast-paced working and daily life of the contemporary city.

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​Together, these research threads point to a central question: 

What makes Shanghai, Shanghai?

Therefore, this book is not only a compilation of the course outcomes, but also an attempt to approach urban spatial research through the history of social life. Taking food and drink as its point of entry, and architectural observation and diagramming as its methods, it demonstrates how students identify urban structures in everyday life, understand historical transformations through space, and further consider how Shanghai—one of China's most distinctive cities—has shaped its own cultural identity through continuous change.

Teaching Team

LIU Naifei​ 

Assistant Research Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

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WANG Qihong / Architect, curator, founding partner of WWWorks [Left]

WU Zhida / Architect, founding partner of WWWorks [Right]

 Teaching Assistant | WU Yilong   PhD candidate, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Outcomes

Group Member: LU Yanni, QIAN Dongjian

TIPSY SHANGHAI captures the contradictory temperament of Shanghai as a modern metropolis: a city flooded by light, yet its bars deliberately retreat into darkness. Starting from this contrast, the study explores how bar spaces systematically manipulate perception and social behavior through light and layout. Tracing the parallel histories of Shanghai's lighting and liquor industries, it reveals the historical logic that "light keeps people on the street; the bar draws them into darkness". Introducing the psychological theory of "alcohol myopia", the study proposes a core argument: a bar does not passively provide atmosphere, but actively manufactures a "controlled cognitive myopia"—dimness weakens environmental perception, spotlights lock attention, and hidden exits delay departure. Through fieldwork at five representative bars (Pony Up, Speak Low, Bar Leone, UTC, EPIC), the team distilled a typology of light and layout. The study finds that light intensity not only demarcates public/private and performance/confession, but also determines the proximity and distance of social relations.

Group Member: Menusha Ariyaratne, Ying Zhi Liew

Designing the Scene is co-authored by Menusha Ariyaratne and Ying Zhi Liew—the "check-in duo"—exploring how Shanghai's international dining spaces operate as performance stages. Through fieldwork at five restaurants, plan analysis, and backstage documentation, the study draws a clear line between the past and the present: from the socialites of the concession era who performed modernity in "foreign-cuisine" restaurants under the elite gaze, to today's influencers who dress up, pose, and document themselves moving through the same city—now addressing a digital audience constructed by algorithms. The researchers argue: the stage never left. On the contrary, it was born for the lens.

Group Member: Zhi Shuen Andrea Chau, En Qing Ng

The core of local identity carried by Benbang cuisine is never transmitted through food alone, but gradually revealed through the interweaving of spatial relations, daily behaviour, and urban public life. Through eight case studies, the research clearly shows how spatial interfaces, circulation layouts, and social activities interact to shape Shanghai's unique urban character and collective memory. Even under waves of modernisation and globalisation, Benbang dining spaces persist in preserving precious localised lived experiences through everyday interactions among people, buildings, streets, and markets. The study ultimately defines Benbang cuisine as a living spatial heritage, confirming that everyday dietary practice not only sustains cultural identity but also actively participates in shaping contemporary urban social life and spatial experience.

Group Member: GUO Yiceng, Ying Nuo

The century-long transformation of Sichuan cuisine in Shanghai cannot be understood as a simple narrative of assimilation. Rather, it has unfolded through two parallel and deeply intertwined trajectories: integration and a search for roots.

Combining historical archival research with contemporary fieldwork, the study identifies, first, a path of integration. Shaped by both the elite culture of the foreign concessions and local consumer preferences, Sichuan cuisine gradually became less spicy and sweeter, while developing distinctly Shanghainese variations. In this process, it evolved from an unfamiliar regional cuisine into an important component of Shanghai’s culinary landscape.

The second trajectory is a search for roots. Across successive generations, Sichuanese migrants used restaurants as spatial anchors for native-place networks. From fundraising performances in support of the War of Resistance and underground Communist liaison stations during the Republican era, to grassroots mutual aid and family-run businesses in today’s Wujiaochang, the dining table has consistently carried social functions extending far beyond food itself.

The research further reveals that, as business models evolved from grassroots cooperation to kinship-based management and eventually to branded chains, the authenticity of Sichuan flavors was, paradoxically, more reliably maintained through standardized supply chains. At the same time, however, the cross-group dialect exchanges, native-place support networks, and temporary communities once formed around the dining table gradually declined. These social connections ultimately retreated from customer-facing public spaces into the private sphere of staff dormitories.

The Sichuan restaurant can therefore be understood as a mobile spatial device of native-place affiliation. It is both a material carrier of sensory memory and a temporary anchor through which migrant communities establish a sense of belonging in an unfamiliar city.

Ultimately, the study reveals a fundamental tension within cross-regional cultural mobility: food is far more transferable than the communities that grow around it. A cuisine may migrate with people, but the ways of life and social networks carried by those migrants are gradually transformed—and eventually left behind—under the combined pressures of urbanization and commercialization.

Group Member: CHENG Zhao, QI Rui

Coffee Shanghai is a research atlas on space and coffee culture. CHENG Zhao and QI Rui take "the evolution of Shanghai's coffee spatial unit" as a thread, using archival research, old photographs, plan analysis, and field investigation to juxtapose 10 cases from the Republican era and the present, tracing the trajectory of Shanghai’s coffee spaces from the Republican period to today. To the researchers, a café is not merely a site of consumption, but a spatial device for observing behaviour, organising sociability, and producing identity. Furniture, architectural components, and human behaviour constantly recombine, forming new usage logics and social relations. The study argues: what changes is not only the café's form, but the way people understand and experience space. From ordered spatial units to fluid, hybrid spatial interfaces, Shanghai's cafés constantly record the ongoing evolution of urban culture, social identity, and modern-life imagination.

Closing Remarks

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