Layout, Urban Space And Culture

The city is an incubator of cultural and material life of human beings. A city without culture would become soulless. What makes a city distinctive is what makes it attractive, and the distinctions are the underlying culture and the explicit manifestation of the culture. To highlight those distinctions, we need to delve into the culture and sense of history in urban public space and present the character and spirit of the city through some vehicle. This thesis takes bookstores in Shanghai as cultural vehicles to demonstrate the bookstore culture and its development in the city. By depicting the geographic distribution of bookstores and studying them against the backdrop of the public space around them, the thesis details the locations and features of some professional bookstores that sell science books, foreign language or textile ones. This thesis will also look at the Fuzhou Road book market as it connects all bookstores in Shanghai as a cultural bond and gives us an opportunity to feel the cultural texture of the city.This thesis harnesses multiple research methodologies to study piles of collected materials, including archives, trade directories, yearbooks, newspaper, periodicals and magazines, and summarize the basic facts and distributions of thousands of bookstores in Shanghai between 1909 and 1949. The distribution of bookstores has something to do with the public space around them. To demonstrate that, Shanghai is first divided into 6 districts, namely Fuzhou Road, Jin'an Si Road, Hongkou, Xiafei Road, old proper and Xia bei, and then bookstores in one district are compared with others. With the help of Shanghai Street Directory, the thesis displays the distributions of science bookstores, foreign language ones and textile ones and the public space around them, furthermore, it explores the connection between the urban landscape and bookstore distribution, and analyzes their locations and business performance to reveal the relation among bookstore distribution,shanghai public space and cultural development.