Authorities in Yangpu District are busy planning and building creation zones and buildings for people with home offices to provide space for creative people.
New buildings deemed "business starting zones" are popping up in the district's old houses and factories. Slogans about "Knowledge Yangpu" can be seen everywhere around Yangshupu Road.
The district is taking actions to build up its creative industries, such as designing, inventing and planning.
Surrounded by top level universities, such as Fudan and Tongji, the district has a rich resource of highly educated people with numerous great ideas.
The district is renovating its old factories and storehouses around Yangshupu Road and Binjiang Road for designers and handicraft masters.
It is also constructing SOHO, or small office, home office, buildings and more incubator bases for small companies. A 400-meter-long creation business road composed of theaters, museums and schoolrooms will be built around Dalian Road.
Yangpu was once a factory-intensive district. Though many of the old state-owned factories have been shut down or moved, their old buildings and storehouses still exist. Many of their skilled laid-off technicians also still live in the area.
Those middle aged technicians, with rich experience and a serious working attitude that they learned in their old factories, are very valuable for the designers, whose ideas and designs need to be turned into products.
Besides setting up buildings to urge people's creativity, the district has built up Shanghai Intellectual Property Park, an intellectual right protection agent, to show its respect for personal creations.
"Fortune is always assembled in the intellectual-intensive areas, so districts like Yangpu need to provide a proper environment to encourage and protect people's creativity," said a planner from the Shanghai Intellectual Property Park.
The government-founded park provides both technical and legal protections for its customers. It helps people or enterprises get intellectual property rights for their designs, inventions or creations, and protects those products from being pirated.
The park will organize some activities to persuade the public to refuse piracy. It will invite people to join in the inventing or creating process to teach them how difficult it is to bring a new product to the market.
The park, which opened on April 19, has attracted 16 firms including advertising design, home decoration and pharmaceutical research companies.
The 12,000-square-meter intellectual park sits just beside the east part of the Huangpu River.
The district, which witnessed industrial prosperity in the first half of the last century, is waiting for its next economic boom, built on the creativity of its people.