The once-smelly and disease-ridden canal area is being made into a new waterfront destination for shopping, strolling and living – while preserving its heritage

A stroll along Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek was, for much of the 20th century, best undertaken with a handkerchief clamped firmly over the nose. Effluent from factories poured directly into its waters, which doubled as a public drinking well and sewer for the multi-generation families living on the sampans that crowded it from bank to bank. Cholera, typhoid, and dysentery were rampant.

Now, what was once Asia’s most notorious aquatic slum is poised to join the likes of Paris’s Canal St Martin as an agreeable urban waterfront.

A multi-million dollar redesign of 7½ miles of canalside was recently awarded to Sasaki Associates, the Boston architect that collaborated on Chicago’s applauded Riverwalk. “The idea,” says Michael Grove of Sasaki, “is that Suzhou Creek will be a place for visitors to stroll, as well as a corridor for commuters walking or cycling to and from the railway station.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Suzhou Creek from Broadway Mansions in 1935. Photograph: Virtual Shanghai

Nodes centred on parks and public squares will be no more than 500 metres apart. “We want to extend the idea of the waterfront beyond the physical water’s edge,” says Grove. “The north shore of False Creek in Vancouver, for example, has a contiguous public edge along the waterfront, but includes restaurants and cultural destinations.”

The odoriferous canal’s rehabilitation began in 1996, when the council, with help from the Asian Development Bank, cleared the creek of barges and factories, and built sewage treatment facilities. This was so successful that duckweed and freshwater fish have returned to its waters.

The creek’s position on the border of two districts –wealthy Jing’an and the traditionally working-class Zhabei – means it has been spared too much development. There are no skyscrapers towering over Suzhou Creek. From the penthouse of the Broadway Mansions hotel – once the social HQ of the foreign press corps – there is still a good view of the sprawling eight-storey Embankment Building, built by in 1932 by property tycoon Sir Victor Sassoon.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victor Sassoon’s Embankment Building. Photograph: Taras Grescoe/The Guardian

Heritage advocates who despair at the way traces of Shanghai’s days as a treaty port are being erased will be pleased that Sasaki plans to spare the neo-Renaissance hotels, cantilever bridges, and art deco apartment complexes that still line the canal.

“All the historic structures will be preserved and reused, mainly for cultural purposes,” says Grove. As a model, he points to the M50 art district, a warren of contemporary galleries in a disused textile mill further up the Creek. New building will be limited to non-historic sites or unoccupied land, in the form of offices, residential buildings and ground-level retail. Construction is set to start in 2019 and take three to four years.

Which means that visitors still have time to stroll Suzhou Creek from the 1911 Garden Bridge to the 1924 Post Office, enjoy a cheerfully dilapidated part of the megacity that has, against all odds, retained the essence of old Shanghai. Minus, of course, the stink.

• Taras Grescoe is the author of Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue on the Eve of the Second World War (Macmillan, £20).To buy a copy for £16.40 including UK p&p visit bookshop.theguardian.com