Constructing City Parks: Reconstructing New Life and New Women Images in 1930s Shanghai

City parks constituted an important part of urban planning in modern China. These parks, serving as new focal points of urban life, provided daily experiential spaces for residents in cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai. Despite recent scholarship studying the new state-driven urbanization in Republican Shanghai, there is limited knowledge about how the Chinese experienced this urban expansion in the city and how these spatial experiences sparked a new visual culture in the modern era. Therefore, this paper aims not only to investigate the construction of city parks in relation to government-led urban planning projects but also to explore how they interacted with mass-produced printed images during the early twentieth century in Shanghai.

The paper examines city parks within three distinct contexts. First, it explores parks as crucial architectural components in the municipal planning of new Shanghai during the 1930s. Additionally, the paper examines how city parks, as public arenas, were used by the Nationalist government to promote ‘new life’ ideologies. This ideological propaganda gave rise to an image-making of ‘new women’ in 1930s Shanghai, which fostered new aesthetics of beauty and bridged political agenda with popular discourse. Lastly, the study investigates how city parks, as visual elements, were appropriated by advertisements. By scrutinizing these three contexts, the paper examines city parks and their multifaceted relation to urban changes and visual culture at the time. Methodologically, this paper considers city parks not only as architectural structures straddling between government-planned projects and everyday spaces, but also as urban sites that stimulated a variety of artistic and popular practices.