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This article explores events in and around a supermarket with a middle-aged man with learning impairments. While documenting their particularities, this article also deploys these events as prisms through which to reflect upon how place is implicated in disabling practice and how the disabling geographies that such practice shapes and is shaped by may be un/re/made. These events are made subject to two readings. In the first, although the supermarket seems merely a backdrop against which events take place, it combines with forms of governmentality in and with regard to place to form a product, or text, through which the normative order speaks. In the second, place is regarded as a dynamic process constituted by innumerable elements in constant motion. Because both these readings register the product and process of disabling geographies, this article attempts, albeit while being thwarted, to realise less disabling geographies through rehabilitating process and attending to the ‘thingness’ of place; actual and imaginative subversions, or reversals and deconstructions. These seek to disturb and trouble disabling geographies and the practice made possible therein.

Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper.

Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on various aspects of contemporary urban Chinese residential life, these accounts typically perpetuate a narrative that situates the anonymous and emotionally distant life in new, often high-rise, apartments in contrast to the hugely more intimate relationships in older, predominantly low-rise living spaces. This article, whilst acknowledging the meaningfulness of such a distinction, first seeks to add ethnographic richness to this division, showing how, at least in the case of a small area within Shanghai’s Luwan district, an old/new neighbourhood division is incapable of expressing the more complex, often ambivalent, ways in which people experience residential life, before proceeding to show how residents’ experiences often cross-cut what is, in large part, a discursive division rather than a physical demarcation of separate spaces. The article also explores the ways in which residents seek to cope with, as well as find security and comfort within, residential spaces that are changing. Permeating this article are various meanings associated with the term ‘ontological security’ that, broadly speaking, refers to the order and regularity, as well as sense of well-being, that people feel in their lives.