To go beyond mainstream scholarship focused on representations, this article offers to shift the gaze from press to outdoor advertising in modern Shanghai (1905-1949). Paying attention to the material and social aspects of advertisements, the emergence of a landscape consciousness can be analyzed in three main steps. Until the 1920s, both the administration and the public viewed outdoor advertising as a potential threat and source of disfiguration for urban landscapes. However, as early as in the 1920s, advertising professionals in search of legitimacy converted that negative view into a positive argument, claiming that advertising offered a new tool for beautifying the city. Public opinion and advertising professionals led municipal authorities to clarify their landscape policies. While pursuing the same goal (preserving residential districts), foreign administrations adopted two distinct strategies (prohibitive taxation in the International Settlement, coercitive zoning in the French Concession). In the 1930s, landscape consciousness shifted to include issues of public hygiene and order during the war (1937-1945). This study of advertising landscapes in Shanghai eventually suggests that advertising spaces played as a laboratory for inventing new ways of seeing and living the modern city in the 20^th century.