Reinventing Shanghai's Shopping Centers in the Post‐Covid Digital Era

The Covid-19 pandemic is nearly coming to an end, yet its socioeconomic-spatial impact has simply revealed the ‘tip of the iceberg’. In particular, the pandemic has stimulated a deeper penetration of digitalization in people's shopping behaviours, spurring mass retail bankruptcies, ‘dead malls’, and ‘ghost boxes’ – the ‘retail apocalypse’. The ‘creative destruction’ of shopping centres in the digital/post-Covid era, however, receives little research attention. What is the future for shopping centres: to repeat the boom-and-bust cycle, or to lurch into a more sustainable regime? In this chapter, we seek to tackle the research gap through a case study of Shanghai. Shanghai is selected for two key reasons. First, Shanghai has long acted as the ‘window of China’ to the world, where many Western retail concepts were first tested and then introduced to the rest of mainland China. Second, China has arguably led online retail innovations worldwide in recent years, many of which were invented or experimented in Shanghai, given that the city has the largest urban population and Gross Domestic Product among cities in China. This chapter unfolds in three key parts: ‘shocks’, ‘adaptations’, and ‘trends’. First, we reveal contemporary ‘shocks’ to shopping centres by reviewing the retail changes in Shanghai in the 2010s, via two contested storylines: (i) the rapid expansion of malls, big-box retailing, and lifestyle centres, versus (ii) the surge of online retailing. Then, we present and analyze a range of emerging socioeconomic-spatial ‘adaptations’ of shopping spaces that likely generate a survival of physical shopping centres. Next, we identify the key ‘trends’ for adapting shopping centres to the digital era, and conclude the chapter by reflecting upon how such trends may enhance or reduce the capacity for sustainable urban transformations.