Reflections on the importance of water for liveability in Shanghai

This paper aims at understanding the relationship between water and liveability in Chinese cities. Specifically, it investigates if and how professionals in the urban planning field in Shanghai refer to the natural environment and to water issues when defining liveability. The presented results have been extracted from a more extended study on how livability is understood and defined at both the city level and the street level in Shanghai (Istrate, 2016). Regarding water issues, the results show that when discussing liveability at the city level in Shanghai, practitioners like architects and planners refer mainly to the quality of water for satisfying the existential needs of people. With a retrospect to the forgotten values of water in human settlements, we propose to reconsider water as a key element in the support for liveability in Shanghai, from all aspects of economy, society, environment and governance.