Gated Communities in China

Gated Communities in China
Author: Choon-Piew Pow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-09-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113402097X

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This book examines the nature and dynamics of gated communities within the specificities of reform Shanghai, a city that arguably has been at the forefront of China’s new urban/consumer revolution.

China's Housing Middle Class

China's Housing Middle Class
Author: Beibei Tang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-10-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351630024

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Home ownership plays a significant role in locating the middle class in most western societies, associated with market, consumerism, democracy and “people like us”, the significant features of the middle class for any society. In China, private home ownership was not the norm from 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power, until the 1990s. In the past three decades, however, there has been a fast growing housing consumption and private homeowners have become the most significantly changing aspect of Chinese urban life. In particular, the rise of gated communities has become a predominant feature of the urban landscape. Similar to their western counterparts, the gated communities in China exemplify “high status” symbols with enclosed and restricted residential areas, exclusive community parks and recreational facilities, and professional management and security services. But different from western societies where gated communities usually represent luxurious lifestyles only limited to a small group of people, in urban China gated communities have become one major form of supply in the housing market and one of the most popular and desirable choices for homebuyers. Private home ownership and residency in gated communities, altogether characterize the most significant aspect of comfort living and distinct lifestyles of China’s new middle classes who have successfully got ahead in the socialist market economy. This book examines the formation of “China’s housing middle class”. It develops a theoretical argument about, and provides empirical evidence of the heterogeneity of China’s new middle class, which underlines the relations between the state, market and life chances under a socialist market economy. As such it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese society, sociology and politics.

Gated Communities in China

Gated Communities in China
Author: 徐苗
Publisher:
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2017
Genre: City planning
ISBN: 9787112198726

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Gated Communities in China

Gated Communities in China
Author: Choon-Piew Pow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2009-09-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134020961

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Moving beyond conventional accounts of gated communities and housing segregation, this book interrogates the moral politics of urban place-making in China’s commodity housing enclaves. Drawing on fieldwork and survey conducted in Shanghai, Pow critically demonstrates how gated communities are bound up in the cultural reproduction of middle-class landscape that is entrenched in the politics of the good life – defined in terms of a highly segregated landscape secured and maintained through the territorialisation of privilege, lifestyle and private property. The study challenges the concept of gated communities as simply ‘spatial containers’ of social classes and argues that Shanghai’s gated enclaves may be more fruitfully analyzed as critical sites of and for the production and consumption of an exclusive lifestyle where nascent middle-class sensibilities and identities are being (re)presented, cultivated and lived. In the final analysis, the book addresses an overarching normative concern by examining how social-spatial differentiation and exclusion in Shanghai’s gated communities potentially disrupt, challenge and unsettle the modern ideals of urban life. By adopting a geographical moral perspective, this book illuminates the moral complexities and ambiguities of place-making in Shanghai’s increasingly polarized urban landscape. As the first book length academic study on gated communities in China, this book will appeal broadly to those with interests in Urban studies and urban social development in China.

The Politics of Community Building in Urban China

The Politics of Community Building in Urban China
Author: Thomas Heberer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2011-03-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1136808434

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This book aims to make sense of the recent reform of neighbourhood institutions in urban China. It builds on the observation that the late 1990s saw a comeback of the state in urban China after the increased economization of life in the 1980s had initially forced it to withdraw. Based on several months of fieldwork in locations ranging from poor and dilapidated neighbourhoods in Shenyang City to middle class gated communities in Shenzhen, the authors analyze recent attempts by the central government to enhance stability in China’s increasingly volatile cities. In particular, they argue that the central government has begun to restructure urban neighbourhoods, and has encouraged residents to govern themselves by means of democratic procedures. Heberer and Göbel also contend that whilst on the one hand, the central government has managed to bring the Party-state back into urban society, especially by tapping into a range of social groups that depend on it, it has not, however, managed to establish a broad base for participation. In testing this hypothesis, the book examines the rationales, strategies and impacts of this comeback by systematically analyzing how the reorganization of neighbourhood committees was actually conducted and find that opportunities for participation were far more limited than initially promised. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Development Studies, Urban Studies and Asian Studies in general.

The Government Next Door

The Government Next Door
Author: Luigi Tomba
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-08-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801455197

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Chinese residential communities are places of intense governing and an arena of active political engagement between state and society. In The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba investigates how the goals of a government consolidated in a distant authority materialize in citizens’ everyday lives. Chinese neighborhoods reveal much about the changing nature of governing practices in the country. Government action is driven by the need to preserve social and political stability, but such priorities must adapt to the progressive privatization of urban residential space and an increasingly complex set of societal forces. Tomba’s vivid ethnographic accounts of neighborhood life and politics in Beijing, Shenyang, and Chengdu depict how such local "translation" of government priorities takes place. Tomba reveals how different clusters of residential space are governed more or less intensely depending on the residents’ social status; how disgruntled communities with high unemployment are still managed with the pastoral strategies typical of the socialist tradition, while high-income neighbors are allowed greater autonomy in exchange for a greater concern for social order. Conflicts are contained by the gated structures of the neighborhoods to prevent systemic challenges to the government, and middle-class lifestyles have become exemplars of a new, responsible form of citizenship. At times of conflict and in daily interactions, the penetration of the state discourse about social stability becomes clear.

Post-gated Era

Post-gated Era
Author: Xiaojin Lin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2019
Genre: Community development, Urban
ISBN:

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"Gated communities, which typically refer to residential compounds that have strict boundaries with entrances guarded by securities and other technology appliances for surveillance, are the most common developments in Chinese cities over the past few decades. These enclosures of isolated city blocks have caused heated discussion since The CPC (Central Committee and State Council) published a guildline in 2016 to prohibit the construction of Gated communities in Chinese cities. For unique historical and social-cultural reasons, “Gated” has been deeply embedded in Chinese traditional dwelling ideology for a long time, and it is still widely accepted by the vast majority as a symbol of security as well as proprietorship, driven by the real estate market to date. However, contemporary China is now entering a more complex phase of privatization, and the previous living pattern is hardly meeting the needs of different hierarchies and is becoming one of the causal factors triggering a series of urban issues in people’s ever-changing lives, such as traffic, the environment, and social well-being. Practices towards an integrated urban community are starting to appear by following western patterns, but merely copying these patterns will very easily lead to contextual failures. This paper will discuss a new framework for designing a future integrated urban community in cities of China and provide a design proposal for an integrated community based on a site in Beijing. By developing the prototype, this paper will attempt to establish the tone for sustainable community practice in a bigger realm, in particular, the concern of social sustainability and resiliency. Several outstanding urban projects are taken as precedents, e.g., POTSDAMER PLATZ, LINKED HYBRID, BARBICAN center, Coop Housing at River Spreefeld, which are evaluated mainly from the perspectives of their design strategy and implementation. The final design proposal aims to advocate physical interaction in a walkable, bikeable community without eliminating the sense of security, and to enhance people's sense of community."--Abstract.

Handbook on Urban Development in China

Handbook on Urban Development in China
Author: Ray Yep
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 432
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1786431637

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The trajectory and logic of urban development in post-Mao China have been shaped and defined by the contention between domestic and global capital, central and local state and social actors of different class status and endowment. This urban transformation process of historic proportion entails new rules for distribution and negotiation, novel perceptions of citizenship, as well as room for unprecedented spontaneity and creativity. Based on original research by leading experts, this book offers an updated and nuanced analysis of the new logic of urban governance and its implications.

China's Urban Communities

China's Urban Communities
Author: Peter G. Rowe
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-06-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3035607060

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Cities in China are extremely dynamic and experience high pressure to grow, transform and adapt. But in what directions, on what basis and to which goals? The authors and their team have researched the intensive transformation processes of about twenty-five neighborhood communities that were created in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Suzhou in the last 30 years, ranging from inner-city to peripheral areas, starting from planning and leading up to user satisfaction studies. This in-depth overview on neighborhood typology and development in China follows the book Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asian Cities by Peter Rowe, who is among the world’s best scholars on urban transformation in East Asia, together with his colleagues Ann Forsyth and Har Ye Kan.

Ending Gated Communities

Ending Gated Communities
Author: Colleen Chiu-Shee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

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Although gated communities have spread globally, their prevalence in China is often attributed to China's unique tradition of gated living. In 2016, China announced policy recommendations intending to end gated communities, which faced societal resistance. To elucidate the nature of this resistance, we interviewed experienced Chinese officials, practitioners, and scholars--who, inevitably, were themselves gated-community residents. They challenge the policy in two ways: policy-rejectors justify gating as common sense and stress risks of ungating, whereas policy-sympathizers understand the policy shift but doubt its feasibility. Their rationales reveal ingrained cognitive dissonance and entrenched state-society tension. Such sentiments that resist ungating collectively create practical and ideological barriers to mitigating housing segregation. China's gated communities showcase how private production of civic goods prioritizes market rules and promotes individual values. China's failure in ungating suggests that the prevalence of privately produced communities can justify exclusion, normalize “gated mindsets,” and reinforce socioeconomic and spatial inequalities.