ERASE AN OLD WORLD

Fifteen years can change a city. But in Shanghai, fifteen years are enough to erase one world and build another. When I first walked through the lanes of the old lilong neighbourhoods — narrow alleys lined with grey bricks, laundry crossing the sky like prayer flags — I had the feeling of entering a living archive. Small Mao-era houses still carried the faint smell of coal and soy sauce. A cat would nap on a wooden bench, while an old man cleaned his enamel bowl by the communal tap. Today, those same streets have vanished, replaced by glass towers and polished lobbies that smell of imported air.

Shanghai has always been a city of reinvention, but the pace of its recent transformation feels almost cinematic. The lilong and shikumen, once the heart of the city’s daily life, are now museum pieces, reassembled in tourist districts like Xintiandi — elegant, yes, but sanitized, too perfect to be true. Where families once shared courtyards and arguments, there are now boutiques selling “heritage” as a lifestyle. The new Shanghai no longer grows from the ground up; it descends from above, through cranes, investors, and a script of global ambition.

Walking around Jing’an or Huangpu today, it’s easy to lose your bearings. Whole blocks have been flattened and reborn as luxurious condominiums with names that sound like perfume: Central Residences, One Park Avenue, Skyline Mansion. Each apartment is a vertical island, high above the noise, high above memory. The city’s new middle class lives in climate-controlled comfort, surrounded by marble, filtered air, and discreet security. It’s a life designed for privacy — something once unthinkable in the Shanghai of shared courtyards and collective kitchens.

The wet markets — those chaotic, visceral stages of everyday life — have also been quietly disappearing. In their place come bright, sterile “fresh halls” where vegetables are arranged in geometric order, and fish no longer flop on the floor. It’s cleaner, yes, but also less human. I remember the wet market on Wulumuqi Road, where a woman sold tofu under a blue tarp, her hands white with steam. The smell was heavy, alive. Now, there’s a Starbucks where her stall used to be, serving cold brew and playlists of gentle jazz.

Progress has its price, and nostalgia is cheap in Shanghai. The city wants to be global, modern, unburdened by the past. Yet something fragile has been lost — not just architecture, but texture. The random poetry of street life: the rhythm of knives against chopping boards, the echo of mahjong tiles, the chorus of street vendors shouting over the traffic. All replaced by the quiet hum of elevators and delivery scooters.

Still, Shanghai remains hypnotic. It’s a city that refuses to stand still, a mirror where the future rehearses its lines. And somewhere, beneath the towers, the ghosts of the lilong still whisper. They remind us that cities are not just built of glass and concrete, but of stories — and those, for now, still find a way to survive.

I’ve taken a break — both from consulting work, which lately even covers all my expenses, and from planning my upcoming trip to Taiwan in December — and finally started going through my old photo archives.

Most of them are on film, both black and white and color. They span the last twenty years, many shot with my Leica M7 and a vintage 35mm Summilux lens. Among them, I found a series taken in Shanghai between 2012 and 2014 — images that reminded me how different the city was back then.

It was quite a surprise to rediscover that, alongside the shoots in my digital archive, I had also shot a few images, on Kodak Portra, taken in the old villa and in the secluded garden that still holds the memories of a life that stood still decades ago. Scanning (as you see here) them doesn’t give back exactly the quality (and the emotion), but at the same time it’s a way to bring you back with me into the magical of that moment.