Untangling a global – local nexus: sorting out residential sorting in Shanghai

The local ‘touchdown’ of globalization gives rise to many complex global – local nexuses, and understanding their nature, structure, and consequences presents a major analytical challenge for globalization research. This paper attempts to untangle one global – local nexus by examining the ‘sorting’ of people into residential or neighborhood spaces in globalizing Shanghai as a function of individual demographic and socioeconomic attributes and by examining personal global connectivity as a key relational variable. We begin with an overview of how local residential differentiation in general and particularly in Shanghai has evolved through the current phase of accelerated globalization and through the city’s booming decade of the 1990s. Then, using survey data from the Pudong New Area of Shanghai in 2001, we present a statistical account and analysis of the increasingly varied and layered residential spaces of Shanghai into which people are ‘sorted’ by both internal local and extralocal factors. The analysis shows that, net of a number of demographic and socioeconomic variables, personal global connections have an effect on people living in different neighborhood areas, especially in more expensive and exclusive housing estates. Finally, we discuss the implications of the findings for how the individual-level impact of global connectivity could reinforce local spatiosocial stratification in rapidly globalizing cities like Shanghai.