From mixed residential compounds to gated communities in Chinese cities: Transition to sustainable housing forms?

Abstract

Residential development in Chinese cities since the 1990s has been commonly organized in the form of housing estates targeted for different socio-economic groups, replacing the former cellular residential compounds built for employees of all ranks in the same organizations. Residential districts also emerged as a result of the urban policy of segregating work places and domicile places. The planning and design of most of the post-1990 residential clusters are adapted from Hong Kong, where semi-enclosed housing estates have long existed and have been regarded as the most common and accepted form of residential organization. They also resemble the gated communities proliferated in American and European cities since the mid-eighties. This paper investigates the causes and the sustainability implications of this newly emerged residential models in China. It first traces the scale of gated residential communities in the leading cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou. It then attempts to explain this new residential trends by investigating factors pertinent to urban China’s marketizing land administration and governance systems, and urban planning and transport policy. It finally explores the livability of this new type of residential organization and its implications for China’s urban sustainability. The analysis will draw on the concepts and debates in the gated community and urban sustainability literature, and uses field data collected in 2010 and 2011.