Digitally Facilitated Gentrification in Shanghai's Historic Urban Landscapes: The (Re)distribution of Aesthetic Sensibilities Through Social Media Platforms

ABSTRACT Drawing on Rancière's “politics of aesthetics,” this paper frames digitally facilitated gentrification as a battleground for visibility and associated value extraction between different stakeholders and investigates how aesthetic sensibilities are redistributed through social media. Combining online analysis and on‐site observations in a historic neighborhood, we reveal that social media privileges consumption‐oriented aesthetics that are conducive for gentrification, while offering little visibility to grassroots narratives that challenge the dominant aesthetic regime. This redistribution of aesthetic sensibilities between stakeholders at the urban–digital interface is driven by the underlying state–capital nexus, which harnesses platform affordances to reposition historic urban landscapes aligning to global aesthetic norms, disguising dissensus and naturalizing gentrification. Our study redefines digitally facilitated gentrification as a contested process of consensus‐building and dissensus‐deflection based on aesthetic norms defined by the state–capital nexus.