In her treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, repeatedly stresses that the key to a successful, vibrant urban environment is diversity. It is diversity, above all, that cities both generate and depend upon in order to thrive. At the heart of this diversity is an intense and varied commercial life.

Big cities are home to large stores and also a huge multiplicity of small enterprises. “With urbanization,” Jacobs writes, “the big get bigger but the small also get more numerous. … Cities are the natural homes of supermarkets and standard movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign groceries, art movies and so on, all of which can be found coexisting, the standard with the strange, the large with the small.”

Commercial diversity is so vital because it is associated with and breeds other types of variety – both of goods and of populations. Stores also provide quasipublic spaces where wide varieties of strangers make contact. These brief meetings – casual, never intimate – but civilized and personal are essential to the urbane existence that makes up city life. Shanghai is a retail potpourri, mixing expensive designer shops, energetic (and chaotic) street markets, obscure boutiques, mammoth malls and innovative design streets.

Whether smelling the fresh blooms in a flower market, creating your own necklaces at a pearl center, admiring the avantgarde cuts of international fashion labels in glossy malls or sifting through layers of dust for an antique treasure, Shanghai’s commercial cosmos contains almost every imaginable shopping experience, for those who know where to find it.

For further reading on the Urbanization of Shanghai, please visit the Urban Future blog at the that’s Shanghai website.