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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography with 706 Youth Space in Shanghai, this paper examines how youth writing practices, care, and co-living recompose polarized urban space after COVID-19, challenging binaries of public/private, cure/care, and individual/collective life.

Paper long abstract

Cities are increasingly governed by polarized logics that separate center and periphery, public and private, and cure and care. These fractures became acutely visible during Shanghai’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when young people positioned within precarious housing, labor, and social networks were placed in states of social and spatial suspension. Drawing on ethnographic research with 706 Youth Space, an independent youth cultural organization in Shanghai, this paper examines how youth-led practices of writing and co-living recompose urban life beyond such polarized imaginaries.

This paper argues that 706 operates as an alternative space—an in-between social field that enables relatively autonomous forms of action within dominant urban and governmental structures. Rather than mobilizing overt resistance, 706 works through ambiguity and temporality to reconfigure youth subjectivity and everyday sociality. During the lockdown, its online writing workshops provided a relational space in which participants narrated everyday suffering, countering the abstraction of state-led biomedical “cure” with practices of care grounded in lived experience. Writing functioned not only as expression but also as an ethnographic and ethical practice that sustained social connection amid isolation.

In the post-pandemic city, 706 further transformed its role through small-scale co-living experiments. Characterized by lightly structured sociality, these spaces enable shared dwelling without demanding constant intimacy, resisting both atomized housing markets and collectivizing forms of governance. Engaging theories of alternative space and relational urbanism, the paper conceptualizes these initiatives as practices of urban repair: modest, experimental ways through which fractured cities are concretely inhabited and reassembled.