Nostalgic grocery stores at Dengshikou Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing Photo: FANG KE/CSST 

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Since the 1970s and 1980s, urban social movements centered on “reconstructing the neighborhood” have swept the globe. Revitalizing local communities and fostering neighborhood solidarity has come to be seen not only as a remedy for a range of urban political, economic, social, and cultural challenges, but also as a cultural countercurrent to the dislocations of modernization and globalization. Reconnecting individuals with their communities is increasingly viewed as a way to restore meaning and a sense of existential belonging.

In China, the community-building initiatives that emerged in cities during the 1990s placed strong emphasis on promoting neighborly interaction. Many scholars view the reconstruction of mutual aid and supportive neighborhood relationships as fundamental to building urban society. Such relationships are seen as the moral foundation for social integration during China’s transition period, the social basis for community autonomy and public life, and a vital embodiment of the ideal of a shared and harmonious living community. 

In recent years, as the public’s aspiration for a better life has grown, urban residents have shown a deepening desire for closer neighborhood ties. The human touch that comes from mutual trust, care, and support among neighbors has become integral to both their sense of well-being and their sense of home.

Amid concern over the erosion of the public sphere, attention has turned once more to locally rooted individuals and social relationships—and, with them, to the importance of “locality.” This renewed focus on everyday life and locality has opened up the possibility for neighborhood businesses to enter the discourse of community building. Much like “core farmers” in rural areas, small neighborhood shopkeepers—who live, work, and maintain their social ties within the same urban community—can also be seen as “core residents” of city neighborhoods. Their everyday interactions with residents, grounded in both product quality and personal rapport, give them the motivation and the means to help knit the social fabric. Moreover, these long-term, local shopkeepers actively shape the local landscape, traditions, and lifestyle, and are themselves a vital source of the neighborhood’s “sense of locality.”

How shopkeepers settle down

Merchants are important contributors to the local public sphere. In particular, since the modern era, chambers of commerce—emerging organizations of businesspeople—have played an active role in a range of public affairs such as social governance, education, infrastructure development, poverty relief, and disaster assistance. These efforts made them a driving force in promoting local self-governance and the transformation toward economic and political modernization. Although most small-scale grassroots merchants are not politically engaged, the inherently social nature of commerce encourages them to build broad ties with nearby residents, participate actively in community public life, and help maintain local social order. Even today, some grassroots chambers of commerce, under the leadership of local federations of industry and commerce, continue to play such roles—contributing to neighborhood governance, environmental improvement, and public welfare.

The influence of neighborhood shopkeepers is most evident at the level of interpersonal interaction. Unlike chain supermarkets and convenience stores—where engagement is transactional, abstract, and depersonalized—independent merchants are uniquely positioned to form emotional connections with local residents. 

However, for individual shopkeepers and others in the service industry, building and maintaining personalized relationships with customers is essential to survival. They consciously adopt emotional strategies to build a base of regular customers, converting interpersonal relationships into business. Nearly all neighborhood shopkeepers—grocers, fruit sellers, market vendors, or snack stall operators—forge emotional ties with patrons by remembering names, exchanging pleasantries, giving compliments or other gestures of goodwill, and recalling individual preferences. These efforts help foster emotional closeness and a sense of ease during transactions. This socially embedded economic form is better understood not merely as a profit-maximizing strategy, but as part of broader social interaction. While the rise of e-commerce has diminished face-to-face interactions, neighborhood shops continue to serve as everyday sites of personal connection.

This emphasis on relationships and emotional bonds allows community shops to play a crucial role in neighborhood public life. In rural areas, where communities are shifting from traditional acquaintance-based networks to looser “semi-acquaintance” structures, small stores have taken on the role of public living rooms—places to chat, relax, and catch up. In cities, some shopkeepers actively foster this function by offering seating, televisions, or other amenities that encourage lingering. Restaurants, teahouses, snack stalls, and barbecue joints go further still: they serve as places for socializing, discussing business, resolving disputes, and exchanging information—genuine nodes of neighborhood life.

Beyond facilitating social interaction, the relationships cultivated by community shops are also the starting point for the warmth of human connection and mutual trust among neighbors. Shopkeeper-customer ties typically fall into three categories: first-time buyers, repeat customers, and regulars. While first-time buyers are treated politely but transactionally, repeat customers and regulars are treated with varying degrees of emotional investment, often greeted with small favors and added warmth. While most exchanges remain within the bounds of the business setting, they often serve as major sources of happiness, social warmth, and a sense of locality.

Neighborhood shopkeepers uphold traditional business practices that help cultivate trust and reciprocity through face-to-face interaction. To attract repeat customers, they must earn the trust of local residents. In addition to being honest, friendly, and offering quality goods, other strategies to win community support include low margins with high turnover, extended service hours, home delivery, and responsiveness to local tastes or needs. Some warm-hearted shopkeepers go further by taking on community caregiving roles: acting as the “eyes on the street” to help ensure public safety; safeguarding keys or parcels for residents; allowing customers to use phones or toilets. Many even permit trusted locals to buy on credit.

Neighborhood sense of locality

The most crucial aspect of neighborhood reconstruction or community building is the ongoing process of cultural translation between local residents—including neighborhood shopkeepers—and various external actors. This translation involves the conversion of knowledge and symbols to establish a shared public understanding that all parties can grasp and accept. Motivated by dissatisfaction with impersonal social relations and the decline of cultural distinctiveness, small, lively neighborhood shops that engage closely with residents have gradually become key carriers of both cultural authenticity and the human touch in urban middle-class visions of community life.

Driven by tourism, nostalgia-fueled consumption, and the broader search for cultural roots, once inconspicuous street economies are reemerging as creative industries and trending hotspots. In this process, neighborhood shopkeepers have either actively or passively assumed the role of cultural translators. On the whole, their role in cultural translation and neighborhood reconstruction is reflected in several key ways.

One role they play is in shaping “local time.” While modern life is governed by standardized clock time, people continue to create distinct temporal experiences to lend meaning to their lives. Unique time experiences and the formation of “locality” go hand in hand. One cultural function of neighborhood shops is to transform standardized clock time into differentiated local time. Moreover, these shops serve as vessels of collective memory. In order to construct local or national identity, strengthen the moral legitimacy of urban development, and satisfy nostalgic consumer demand, some historically significant old brands and traditional streets have been turned into heritage sites and promoted as “urban name cards” symbolizing local history and culture.

These businesses also help construct the visual and emotional landscape of the neighborhood— serving as vital media through which abstract spaces are transformed into concrete places. Through unique architecture, language, merchandise, and ritual or festive activities, they give tangible form to emotions, sensations, and culture. In doing so, they endow neighborhoods with distinctive visual characteristics and local flavor, giving locality texture, visibility, and depth.

Consumption, too, is a form of meaning-making, and neighborhood shops help shape local lifestyles through the goods and experiences they offer. For example, teahouses scattered across Chengdu’s parks and alleyways complement the tea-drinking, mahjong-playing lifestyle of its residents. These shops not only offer leisure and entertainment for locals but also constitute a unique local landscape.

Local shops also serve as venues for reconnecting people and place via three primary mechanisms: First, individuals emotionally integrate with the place to gain recognition and a sense of belonging. For many, the value of neighborhood shops lies in the intimacy generated by specific interpersonal relationships. Second, they experience social life and the spirit of place through a sensory connection to the environment. Third, people connect with others through social interaction. Community commercial spaces are important facilitators of social relationships—by serving as ideal gathering places for family and friends, they bring shopkeepers and customers closer and turn strangers into acquaintances or even friends. 

Foundational role in community life

Cities are known for their mobility, but small businesses rooted in communities create essential “pauses” in the midst of movement. These pauses span both spatial-temporal and social dimensions, creating conditions for the experience of value and anchoring a renewed sense of locality. Far from being static, conservative, or exclusionary, communities built around commercial spaces highlight the everydayness, relationality, and constructed nature of neighborhood life.

Local shops scattered throughout streets and alleys play a vital role in this spontaneous formation of neighborhood order. They not only provide convenience and care for nearby residents but also actively contribute to the cultivation of social networks, the shaping of lifestyles, the production of value norms, and the formation of neighborhood identity. Their imprint is visible in emotional ties, community traditions, and cultural identities unique to their locales.

If we are to transform the current top-down model of neighborhood development into a bottom-up cultivation of neighborhood order, fully tapping into the social attributes of local shops and using them to reshape a sense of “nearby” will provide new solutions for overcoming the challenges of existing community-building efforts. With support from national policies and growing public cultural awareness, reserving a proportion of affordable housing for the poor, the working class, and small-scale grassroots commerce in urban spatial planning and redevelopment will help preserve the social and cultural diversity of cities. It will also ensure that local shops can continue to integrate economic and social functions, thereby sustaining their foundational role in community life.

Li Cuiling is an associate professor from the School of Sociology at Wuhan University.

Edited by  YANG XUE