Reconfiguring Home in Pandemic Shanghai: Material Practices, Care, and Infrastructural Inequality

This article examines how domestic life was materially and socially reconfigured during Shanghai’s COVID-19 lockdowns. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2023 with 32 households across different housing types and neighborhoods, it explores how residents attempted to produce security, care, and stability under conditions of logistical breakdown, uneven governance, and prolonged uncertainty. Practices such as food stockpiling, digital coordination, improvised home-working arrangements, repair, sanitization, and small-scale cultivation transformed the home into an infrastructure of survival and a site of emotional negotiation. These practices reveal that home was neither a naturally safe refuge nor simply a place of confinement, but a dynamic and contested process through which domestic life was continually remade. Situating the Shanghai case within anthropological debates on home, material culture, care, and urban crisis, the article shows how infrastructural inequality was lived through household space, everyday objects, digital infrastructures, and neighborly relations in pandemic Shanghai itself.