By Glenn Mott

I'm sitting in a restaurant with my friend J.X. "Jack" Zhu, having returned to Shanghai after 13 years away.

We've ordered a bowl of hot orange mapo doufu, a favorite Szechuan dish we used to share at street stalls an age ago, when it was still possible to see the old low-rise Shanghai before its economic thaw and spectacular rise as a city of crystalline structures in glass and steel.

"So what's going on in my city?" Jack asks. He is not the only Shanghai resident to tell me that the pace of development can make him feel like a stranger in his native city.

I've been here with a group of journalists who have come to interview some of the leadership, including the mayor, Han Zheng.

I come now under a much-improved set of circumstances from my first visit, when I was living here as a university teacher — or so it would seem by my surroundings on the 35th floor of the Four Seasons Hotel, where the maid, while you are out having dinner, stacks the spare change on your night table after she turns down your bed linens. But this kind of luxury comes at a price, not measured in simple yuan.

Under every new hotel in Shanghai are the footprints of those who built it, the economic exiles from the countryside, and the Shanghai residents relocated from their communal alleys to the urban fringe settlements of residential high-rises.

Taking my laps face-down in the hotel pool, I think of the labyrinthine lilong, the traditional dwellings of shi ku men — houses whose beamed and tiled rooftops would have been at about the level of the water I swim in. Luckily, life is not all reflection and rumination, or we would ruin what comfort we can afford of the city's luxuries.

The irony of such reflections is that Shanghai is everyone's new address in the global economy, and the new Shanghai is like nothing so much as the old Shanghai shedding its skin to become more like its old mercantile self again.

The city is actually more livable than it was when I taught here. There are free parks and greenspaces now, where once there was impermeable congestion that locked the old mansions behind claptrap extensions, the result of government efforts in the 1950s to maximize space for a growing population.

Unfortunately, much of this openness comes at the loss of the tightknit lilong communities, the maze of small alleys and intersecting lanes that ran off the main thoroughfares throughout the city.

The best place to see the traditional architecture of the region and the communal living it engendered is not in the city itself, but in the water towns around Shanghai, where the most salient features are not just the placid interlocking canals and half-moon bridges, but a social structure that is almost entirely disappearing in the modernity of the city center.

Take a bus to towns like Zhouzhuang, Tongli, Nanxun, Xitang, Wuzhen or Jiaozhi, and you'll arrive at the spots where most of the framed beauty shots hanging in Shanghai's galleries and restaurants were taken.

Shanghai is the head of the dragon for the entire Yangtze delta, an excellent entry point to China itself, with frequent air connections to other major cities. Between Shanghai and nearby water towns, travel by bus; most are comfortable, air-conditioned and restroom-equipped, with fares in the $5 to $15 range.

Travels with Lonely Planet