Supporting data for “Reinventing Colonial Legacy in A Worlding City: Rethinking Gentrification in Central Shanghai, China”

The notion of gentrification links global forces (e.g. neoliberalism, globalisation) with local responses (e.g. redevelopment, conservation) at the neighbourhood level. With a focus on central Shanghai, this thesis first unpacks how (both symbolic and material) colonial legacy serves as key resources to attract transnational gentrifiers/(re)investments and displace less affluent classes in the contemporary gentrification process. Second, this study examines the constantly changing interplay between the state, market and society to unravel the driving forces, processes, and social consequences in various waves and forms of gentrification. Third, particular focus is given to the role of the (traditional and digital) media in contemporary (re)gentrification, examining the influence exerted by the market, state and society on media narratives and representations.The dataset consists of web-scraped Weibo data in three case studies. Weibo, launched by Sina Corporations, was selected as the representative social media platform for several reasons. First, Weibo boasts the largest user base among Chinese social media platforms, with over 0.5 billion active users. This vase user base provides a huge amount of information that can be utilised to analyse public perceptions of gentrifying/gentrified neighbourhoods. Second, the features of Weibo are more like a fusion of Twitter and Instagram, making it easier to align findings on Weibo with existing research on Twitter and Instagram. Third, Weibo, the first Chinese-style microblog platform launched in August 2009, provides long-term data spanning over a decade, facilitating the track of changing media portrayals of gentrification over time.To obtain sufficient data, the Chinese terms ‘JianYeLi’, ‘WuKang Road, ‘AnFu Road’ were respectively chosen as the initial keywords for data collection using a web-crawler tool. Specifically, each scraped post contained a social media ID, a timestamp, textual content, image URLs, and received likes/shares/comments. The initial dataset consisted of nearly 50,000 posts between 2011 and 2021. Since the main focus is on how social media users reflect the gentrification of selected neighbourhoods, forwarded and irrelevant posts were first cleaned, and only the used subsampled datasets were uploaded. As the posts were public-facing, individual user permission was not sought.

gentrification 之概念，将全球力量（如新自由主义、全球化）与地域性响应（如复兴、保护）在邻里层面相互联系。本论文以上海中心城区为研究对象，首先剖析了（既具象征意义又具物质性）殖民遗绪如何成为吸引跨国gentrifiers/(re)investments及在当代gentrification过程中驱逐低收入阶层的核心资源。其次，研究探讨了国家、市场与社会之间不断变化的互动，以揭示gentrification各波次和形式背后的驱动因素、进程及其社会后果。第三，特别关注（传统与数字）媒体在当代（re)gentrification中的作用，考察市场、国家与社会对媒体叙事和表征的影响。数据集包含三个案例研究的网络爬虫抓取的微博数据。微博，由新浪公司推出，被选为代表性社交媒体平台，原因如下：首先，微博在中国社交媒体平台中拥有最大的用户基础，超过5亿活跃用户，庞大的用户群体提供了海量的信息，可用于分析公众对gentrifying/gentrified邻里地区的认知。其次，微博的特点更类似于Twitter与Instagram的融合，使得将微博上的发现与Twitter和Instagram上的现有研究进行对齐变得更为简便。第三，微博作为首个于2009年8月推出的中国式微博平台，提供了长达十年的长期数据，便于追踪gentrification随时间变化的媒体描绘。为获取足够的数据，选择“简业里”、“武康路”、“安福路”等中文术语作为数据收集的初始关键词。具体而言，每个抓取的帖子包含社交媒体ID、时间戳、文本内容、图片URL以及获得的点赞/分享/评论数。初始数据集包含2011年至2021年间近50,000篇帖子。由于主要关注社交媒体用户如何反映选定邻里地区的gentrification，因此首先清理了转发和无关帖子，并仅上传了使用的子样本数据集。由于帖子面向公众，未寻求个别用户的许可。