My favourite home I've lived in out of the many over the years was a 1930s lane house in the French Concession in Shanghai. There were three floors I think. You would enter through a shared kitchen on the ground floor and there were very steep old wooden stairs up to floors above. We never had to use any of the shared facilities as our space had been developed into a modern apartment, but that's the way people used to live in Shanghai and how our neighbors still did. Our neighbor on the same floor was a lady in her eighties who had lived there since she was a teenager. The lanes between homes were maybe 10 feet wide, and there was even an old covered well in the little square. Our neighbor right across from us had also lived there for most of his life. I always had a really hard time understanding the lady next door because her Shanghainese was so strong, but we developed a good relationship and we all took care of each other. I went to visit them and brought them gifts from Canada the last time I passed through Shanghai. In terms of the financial status of the people around me, it was the poorest community I've ever lived in and a strange place to find people doing the work my wife and I were doing, but it was a real community and I haven't loved living anywhere else as much as I loved there.
You can read about it and other communities like it online. There's even a picture from right outside my front door in this article:
https://www.smartshanghai.com/articl...es-of-shanghai
Quote:
In his book Lanes in Shanghai, professor Luo Xiaowei writes, “there would be no Shanghai if there were no lanes, nor would there be any Shanghainese”. Academics think that the lanes have shaped the fundamental character of the people. How?
Lanes are dense neighborhoods, with many perpendicular branches running off a main artery. They jam all kinds of people, of all different ages and social classes, together. The public and shared spaces, like kitchens and courtyards, mean residents are always in contact with their neighbors.
As anyone who has actually lived in a lane can tell you, that’s not always a good thing. Disputes and disagreements are inevitable when you shove so many people together in a tight space. But lanes force people to resolve their differences, the thinking goes, because where else are they going to go? There’s no hiding in a lane.
There’s a Chinese proverb that sums up the positives of lane life: Good neighbors are more helpful than far-away relatives.
At least part of the Shanghainese reputation for open-mindedness and business savvy are said to come from lane culture. So they say.
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