China Lockdown
Gated communities and stratification in the People’s Republic
Neville Mars and Saskia Vendel, Dynamic City Foundation
The grey brick and mortar walls, so distinctly Chinese and so beautiful, are being demolished; the old neighborhoods they encircle and the narrow alleys they delimit torn down. In Beijing only 137 of the 7000 Hutongs (in the year 1949) are still standing. The unremitting thrust of modernization and urban expansion has overhauled the old and replaced it with the new, and not only in Beijing but far beyond the coast and China’s boomtowns. This trend is in line with the nation’s objective to become a ‘well-off urban society’ , a society that provides the foundations for a modern lifestyle, and offers the opportunities to become rich and to be free. However, at the same pace the walls of ancient China crumble, new gates and fences are erected. Up-market residential areas, built as fully-fledged gated communities, are mushrooming across the nation. As China opens up to world and its economy stretches out, its well-off population is preparing for lockdown.
Around the world, in a variety of forms, the phenomenon of fortification has made its mark: in South-America it is a village surrounded by barbwire and cameras, in the U.S. the communities for senior citizens are enclosed by desert, and across Europe developers have started building neighborhoods fenced off by walls and moats in response to an increasing demand for seclusion, a sense of safety and community living. With the arrival of the walls in the West the debate too has been raised; the discussion on the gated community revolves around issues of segmentation of the urban and the social realm. The words that have evolved to describe the nature of these communities are as divers as they are amusing: Privatopia, Nerdistan, Euroghetto, Vertical Themed Communities, Golden Ghetto, Split City, Teletopia; they all refer to the closed communities where citizens have flocked together based on ideology, lifestyle, fear or hope.
In China too, neighborhoods with the characteristics to fit any of these titles can easily be found; the debate however hasn’t started yet. Although in China’s warped economic development the consequences of fortification are more profound than in the west. As the privileged draw together behind walls, the new classes of China’s once classless society are sharply delineated. Developers, landowners, investors and residents have together invented a new territory within a territory. Entire networks of residential areas arise like modern fortresses, with private infrastructure, privatized services and self-governance. The gates and guards are just a symptom of a process of stratification that is less visible but evermore decisive for the spatial, organizational and social order of China’s urban society. With every wall erected it is more apparent the gated community is claiming a fundamental role in its development process.
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Sources: Piper Gaubatz (1999), China’s Urban Transformation: Patterns and Processes of Morphological Change in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Urban Studies, vol. 36, no. 9, pp. 1495-1521. Guillaume Grigoir, Gated Communities, Clubs in a Club System. The Case of Beijing. Fulong Wu, Klaire Webber (2004) The Rise of “Foreign Gated Communities” in Beijing: between Economic Globalization and Local Institutions, Cities, Vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 203-213.
Neville Mars and Saskia Vendel
2005-02-14