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Two Water Towns in the Qingpu District of Shanghai Semprebon

engagement. In Zhujiajiao, a condition of reconstruction” [46] present ontological and
fragility has emerged from the negotiation disciplinary issues, such as the idea that an
involving the connotates of authenticity and identified historical moment could be frozen
originality, a process that has undermined and re-proposed out of its time-space
their semantic integrity [77-81, 41] . coordinates. While Western heritage
Long-term settled families were replaced discourse has recognized historical layering
by a new class of merchants, mainly dealing as an expression of material originality, and
with tourist activities. Their presence turned therefore has excluded this approach,
the settlement into an amusement park and practitioners in other contexts have, on some
provided all desirable services. The visiting occasions, considered that authenticity “is
experience became an act of consumption that often related with tradition rather than
is gradually eroding the town’s cultural tangible materiality” [43] , often due to the
dimension, tangible and intangible. Indeed, widespread use of different construction
beyond the physical adaptation of buildings to techniques and materials. The diverse
host souvenir shops and welcome guided lifespan of building components created the
tours, the populace’s socioeconomic structure conditions for considering formal symbolism
also changed significantly with the arrival of beyond material originality as a vector of
extraneous workers whom are naturally more identitarian values [82] . Forms have offered
interested in the financial potential of the site vehicles to convey messages with immediacy
rather than its inherited essence and soul. and, regardless of the contingent attributes
Tourist agencies ensured that the visitor’s featuring their material originality, have often
experience was not corrupted by the carried important sociocultural values. The
diversified social extraction of indigenous reproducibility of forms and the legitimation
people. This form of relocation induced by of their symbolic capacity led copies,
exogenous factors finds correspondences imitations, and replicas to be appreciated as
with phenomena of gentrification led by parts of a cultural inheritance, capable of
urban renewal in central districts worldwide. creating spatiotemporal continuities with
In China, it assumes a peculiar character traditions, either extinguished or alive.
driven by state capitalism, the main force Messages, or the semantic, have gradually
orienting development plans and prevailed on the authenticity of their vector or
transforming entire neighbourhoods. their syntactic, assuming identitarian
Xintiandi embodies the allegedly most connotates valid “per se.”
famous Shanghainese historical district In a sense, Zhujiajiao represents a
gentrified in the last decades and illustrates benchmark toward which many water towns,
how economic impulses have sacrificed urban such as Liantang, are moving by leveraging
inclusion, diversity, multifaced identities and cultural assets to negotiate values of material
authenticities on the altar of cultural and and social originality with those of economic
rhetoric commodification. Here resides prosperity and political narration. Notable
fragility’s ontology: the sneaky promise for examples in the same region are Xitang,
political and socioeconomic profits Wuzhen, and Tongli, recalled by Philip Ball
simultaneously leads to the erosion of the as sites where “you can still hope for a taste
cultural status, for which a site is of what life on the Grand Canal might have
acknowledged. Recognizing some cultural been like before it was plied by oil-drinking
status is increasingly becoming the tag barges and crossed by highways on great
identifying the most accredited places of concrete arches” [54] . A few lines below,
consumption and threatening the same commenting on the impact of mass tourism,
characteristics of authenticity and originality, he remarked “True, these places are preserved
“the very landscape” [57] . now for tourists, and in high season you can
In most cases, the meanings and values hardly walk around the network of little
epitomized in the notion of “destructive canals without being badgered to buy

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