Gated: The Rise of Urban Exclusion in China 

It's my first time inside the pristine cavities of a gated community – epitomes of elitism; fortresses of fame — J.G. Ballard's "flawed utopias of the near future." But for all the hype, a vague sense of lack characterizes my experience. Living in a gated community is like inhabiting an architect's yet to be realized cardboard model, where even accidental stray stones have a simulated touch. I don't catch as much as a glimpse of my neighbors all week; and apart from waving to the compound gardener as he cleans the pool, human interaction is limited to dialogues with the intercom taxi button. For all intents and purposes I could be anywhere. The distinctly hazy horizon is the only element that connects me to Shanghai and rescues me from spatial and temporal oblivion.

The idea of demarcating boundaries around prestigious living quarters is nothing new; but in their contemporary form, gated communities are a relatively recent global trend, and over the past two decades, the upper crusts in regions like North and South America, Africa and the Middle East have increasingly chosen to enclose themselves in security housing compounds.

The proliferation of such communities has become a subject of debate among urban planners and academics. In the U.S., recent studies like Blakely and Snyder's Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States are endemically critical of this recent incarnation. These authors regard gated communities as symptomatic of fading notions of community and citizenship through which Americans are becoming increasingly privatized, atomized and localized, and losing the ability to envision or work toward a common good: "gated communities have their antecedents in modern utopias, but they have been transformed into a totally new product, organized and marketed as a solution to contemporary problems rather than as a search for a better communal system." Indeed, gated communities are kind of like the house-buyer's equivalent to a packaged vacation deal. They eradicate the need to negotiate with the world at large and negate issues of difference.

Gated communities are not only criticized as symptoms of a culture of escapism, but also as symbols of social exclusion. Distinguishing oneself from the masses for the sake of status reinforces power relationships across ethnic, racial and cultural lines. The construction of gated communities is therefore often regarded as a manifestly political act, one that intensifies social and spatial segregation and further delineates the borders of race and class. The mass migration of urban elites to such communities is motivated by a desire to escape the threat of violence and crime characterizing so many of the world's regions that suffer from an ever-widening socio-economic gap. Critics argue that segregation predicated on fear only furthers this chasm.

The rising number of gated communities in China is altering the design and structure of sub/urban landscapes. While the discourse of fear is less applicable to the Chinese city, urban fragmentation affected by the noise and pollution of increasingly crowded cities arguably results in an analogous form of urban insecurity to which gated communities serve as a welcome refuge. The ability to afford the luxury of opulent, walled-in living quarters also signifies esteemed social rank and is a sure way to gain "face" within the context of market-led economic growth.

As a physical form, the gate belongs to a specific historical lineage in China, and has continuously demarcated the border dividing inside from outside. Venerated historical relics like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City serve as testimony to a psychology of protectionism to which the word for city in Mandarin 城市 or chéng shì (chéng also means wall) is no exception. As part of this lineage, China's gate has most recently taken a new shape under market transition. According to Fulong Wu, who studies the transition from work-unit compounds to gated commodity housing enclaves in urban China, gated communities display the historical gate rediscovered under a new system: "the gate...has been rediscovered as an instrument for the partitioning of derelict socialist landscapes produced by 'economizing urbanization' and a post-socialist imagined 'good life.'" Under socialism, Wu says, gating reinforced political control and collective consumption organized by the state. In the post-reform era, gates simply demarcate emerging consumer clubs in response to the retreat of the state from the provision of public goods. By walling off the rising ranks, then, the gate under market reform serves a definitively anti-socialist function and epitomizes the disjuncture endemic to stratified societies.