Zhabei

Zhabei no longer exists as an administrative unit, and that erasure tells a story about Shanghai's relentless urban metabolism. The former Zhabei District—once Shanghai's gritty working-class quarter north of Suzhou Creek—was merged into Jing'an District in 2015, eliminated by administrative fiat to create a unified central district that real estate developers and city planners preferred to market as premium rather than proletarian.

Zhabei's history was defined by destruction and reconstruction. Japanese forces bombed the district during the 1932 Shanghai Incident, devastating its dense urban fabric. The area was bombed again during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai. After 1949, Communist planners rebuilt Zhabei as an industrial and residential zone for workers—a function it served for decades as Shanghai's factories operated at full capacity. The Shanghai Railway Station, located in Zhabei, made it a gateway district through which millions of migrants entered the city.

By the 2000s, Zhabei's working-class identity had become an economic liability. Adjacent Jing'an District—home to luxury hotels, shopping on Nanjing Road, and premium office towers—commanded dramatically higher real estate prices. Merging Zhabei into Jing'an was officially about 'administrative efficiency,' but the economic logic was transparent: eliminating the Zhabei name allowed redevelopment of its 840,000-resident territory under the Jing'an brand, immediately increasing land valuations.

The Zhabei-Jing'an merger illustrates how cities consume their own neighborhoods through gentrification-by-administration. Rather than letting market forces gradually transform the district (as happened in Brooklyn or Shoreditch), Shanghai's government simply deleted the boundary—a top-down ecological disturbance that eliminated an entire urban identity in a single bureaucratic act. The railway station remains; the name does not.