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A few days into the quarantines that ushered in the Year of the Rat, printed QR codes began to appear everywhere in Shanghai. This was the beginning of a QR code health registration scheme, which was used to manage population during the Coronavirus pandemic. Register and you were given a coloured QR code. A green code meant access to the city was open, with a red code the metropolis was locked. Ubiquitous QR codes are not new to China's urban landscape. Starting around 2015 these simple black and white images, complex enough to encode characters, but cheap and easy to produce, created a virtual economy based on mobile-payments that has totally transformed city life. More than texting or talking, watching, listening or wayfinding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell phone's killer app. This essay explores the machinic assemblage of cell phones + QR Codes which opens a portal into an emerging mediasphere that is fundamentally non-anthropomorphic in nature. Scanning a QR code is an embodied practice or sensing system that activates an all-pervasive locative media, transforming the previously inert physical landscape into the urban scale, distributed intelligence of the sentient city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shanghai’s officials and urban planners often equate development with “cleaning up the streets.” The snacks (xiao chi 小吃) that are sold from the small shops and mobile stands—dumplings steamed in wooden baskets, nighttime barbeques, carts selling stir-fried noodles—are seen to belong to a past that must be overcome. This paper reflects on the changing fate of Shanghai’s street food in order to analyze tensions between a regulated, formal commercial sector and a much more anarchic informal economy as it plays out in the making of the future city. It argues that the informal is not simply a temporary phenomenon, and that the evolutionary conception of economic growth in which a “backward” black market progresses to a more “advanced” formal sphere masks a deep (and sometimes violent) struggle. Shanghai’s importance as a model for twenty-first century urbanism rests not only on its high-speed trains and super-tall skyscrapers, but also, just as vitally, on its street food, street markets and street life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]