Wars have a tremendous impact on territories and their populations. Many cities were, at one point in their history, subjected to the grueling consequences of warfare. Some have suffered repeated assaults, successive cycles of destruction and reconstruction, displacement of population, and as a consequence, a remolding of their environment. Yet only a few large modern metropolises have gone through such cycles of sudden and thorough destruction, followed by periods of more or less rapid reconstruction, involving a massive regeneration of their populations. In this project, we plan to establish that Shanghai represents an exceptional – though unfortunate – case of urban space that was engulfed in several conflicts from the mid-19th century to the late 1940s. The city can also claim the sad record to have been the first city in the world to be exposed to and ravaged by modern weaponry and to have suffered from heretofore unknown levels of violence.