Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town

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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 8, No. 1, 4566, 2003

Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town: The Gated Community in Chinese Cities and Its Solution

PU MIAOABSTRACT Since the 1978 economic reform, more and more residential areas in Chinese cities have walled themselves away from their surroundings in order to improve security. What do these gated communities look like as compared to their US counterparts? What impact does this new development have, especially on urban life in high-density Chinese cities? How do cities in a developing, socialist country pick up so quickly a capitalist real-estate pattern started in the US just a few decades ago? This paper, the rst on the topic, presents a preliminary investigation of these issues and proposes alternative design solutions to address the problems. A New Trend These days, if a visitor ventures into one of the new residential areas outside Shanghais Inner Ring Road, he or she will hardly forget the eerie feeling present in the urban scene as compared with the bustling streets of the central city. While the densely placed mid- or high-rise apartment buildings along the street do not look very different, they all rise out of walls more than 2 metres high, and are further rimmed by immaculate hedges and tile-paved sidewalks. But you see few souls on most of these sidewalks! The entire urban space looks like a giant stage set without actors. The walls keep going on and on, sometimes as long as 500 metres, and are only occasionally punctured by a gaudy gate decorated with copies of Greek statues and private guards dressed like police ofcers. Between the gates you nd nearly empty sidewalks in a city of citadels (Figure 1). This may seem odd, because the visitor is in an area with nearly 10 000 residents per square kilometre (Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, 2001, p. 25). Such an experience is the result of a new trend rapidly altering the face of Chinese urban residential areas: the gated community. This paper is the rst research on probably the most signicant development in recent Chinese urban planning and design. Until the 1950s, most Chinese urban dwellers lived in traditional (pre-1949) low-rise courtyard houses accessible through a web of alleys (one house sometimes accommodated several poor families). From the 1950s to the 1960s, the state constructed in existing cities workers new villagesgroups of barracklike, six to seven-storey apartment buildings. The new villages had no walls or were walled but with many open entries to the streets. To quickly make up forPu Miao, School of Architecture, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. Email: [email protected] Print/14699664 Online/03/010045-22 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1357480032000064764

Downloaded by [National Taiwan University] at 08:59 24 April 2012

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(a)

(b)

Figure 1. Sidewalks next to gated communities in suburban Shanghai.

Gated Community in Chinese Cities

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the housing shortage in existing cities, caused by the near-zero growth in residential construction during the 10-year Cultural Revolution (196676), China has undertaken massive housing developments since the 1978 reform. In 2000, the country had 44 100 million square metres of residential oor area, which was almost four times that of 1985 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2001, p. 344). It is safe to say that almost all the added housing stock took the form of gated communities. Gates have become the standard feature of master-planned new communities in the suburban area, but we also nd them in the central city. They appear in smaller new developments of luxury types in in-ll projects and also in retrotted traditional housing and the new villages. For example, the Longtan Beili Residential Quarter (1965) in Beijing reduced its original 15 open entries to eight gated ones with guards in 2000 (Xiao, 2002). Between 1991 and 2000, 83% of the residential communities in Shanghai were gated in a variety of ways (Su, 2000). During a similar period, Guangdong Province, which includes two economic powerhouses, Guangzhou and Shenzhen Cities, gated 54 000 communities covering more than 70% of urban and rural residential areas, and containing more than 80% of the population (Zhang, Z., 2001). While national statistics are not available, these gures give a rough idea of how extensive gating has been in China. The Sealed Residential Quarter Gated communities proliferated in the US about two decades ago, and have been a hot topic of debate ever since. What are the basic characteristics of Chinese gated communities? In particular, how do these developments resemble their well-studied US predecessors? The following is a description of typical gated communities in China, based on analyses of 12 planning schemes published in Jianzhu Xuebao (Architectural Journal) from 1996 to 2000. The Chinese refer to their gated communities as sealed residential quarters. Akin to the Neighborhood concept originating in the 1920s US, the residential quarter, or xiaoqu, nds its direct lineage in the microrayon of Soviet Russian planning theory introduced into China in the 1950s (Gaubatz, 1995, p. 31). Sanctioned by national planning codes, the concept has since become the basic unit in planning and developing residential construction. All new masterplanned communities are designed as residential quarters (Figure 2). The term is so inuential that inner-city, traditional residential areas also apply it to themselves administratively even though they have quite different physical forms. Similar to its US counterpart, a sealed residential quarter is a walled compound with one or more guarded gates, sometimes supplemented by high-tech surveillance equipment such as closed-circuit cameras and infrared alarm systems at the borders. The new master-planned residential quarter has some semi-public amenities within the gate. Depending on the price range of the units, the amenities range from a mere concentrated green space as the minimum, to a variety of extras such as playgrounds, a clubhouse, and even stores and a swimming pool. Some kind of residents organization runs the community with its private security team. However, a Chinese gated community tends to be much larger in population and land area, and more standardized in its layout than an American one. Based on the national model of the residential quarter, a Chinese walled development

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Figure 2. A typical Chinese residential quarter. usually covers 1220-plus hectares of land and holds 20003000 families (assuming 3.23.5 persons each family). The huge size is believed to create economies of scale, but it also generates the monopoly of a single development model. About 510 residential clusters constitute the residential quarter, and several residential quarters make up a residential district. In contrast, nearly half of all gated communities in the US have less than 150 units each, and they have far more varied forms and organizational structures (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, p. 22). One of the two differences between the US and the Chinese gated communities which is consequential to the later discussion involves the much higher density in the residential quarter; Chinese cities generally have densities about 510 times greater than those of US ones (US Census Bureau, 1994, p. 840). While the mainstay in US urban housing types is the low-rise, single-family home with about 1215 families per hectare, the buildings in a Chinese residential quarter are primarily high- (10 or more stories) and mid-rise (6-storey walk-ups), with 120180 families per hectare and a oor area ratio of 1.21.5. Developments in the central city could demand even higher densities. In such a jammed city, hardly any residential development can nd itself surrounded by green elds, as we see at a US suburban gated community. In China even a suburban residential quarter tends to be bordered by arterial streets with other residential communities across the streets. The other important distinction has to do with Chinese peoples heavy reliance on walking and public transportation. For the time being most Chinese families cannot afford a car. On average, there was only one privately owned automobile in every 200 households in 2000 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2001, p. 310). Although this may change in the future, cars will probably not be used for trips within the urban area due to structural congestion, as can be inferred from the current situation in Tokyo, Hong Kong and similar Asian cities.


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Although the gated community in the US caters mainly for the needs of the rich and the middle classes, it is the housing form for the majority of Chinese residents. While enclaves designed exclusively for the well-to-do have all the media coverage, most existing gated communities, especially those retrotted ones which were built before the reform, have mixed income levels among their residents. Following the socialist tradition, until the end of the 1990s, work units assigned apartment units of generally similar standards to their employees (the challenge was how to get one). Even today, government or state-controlled company ofcials are awarded luxury accommodation but not necessarily superhigh salaries. Gating in the US serves different purposes in communities with different social and economic characteristics: to prevent outsiders from using privatized public amenities, to ensure prestige, or to increase protection (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, pp. 3945). The primary reason for gating in China currently, however, is always security, with others existing merely as additional rewards. A Chinese gated community is also managed quite differently from an American one. Due to the co-existence of various types of housing ownership (e.g. owned by the state, state-controlled enterprises, and individuals), and the immature state of the Chinese legal system, not all municipalities have a permanent statute for the establishing, funding and operating of the condominium management. Therefore, many gated communities in China are managed by an ad hoc group of local government ofcers, property managers, developers and homeowner representatives who are not necessarily elected. Such a body tends to have problems with effective administration, even in basic matters such as collecting homeowner dues (Wang et al., 2001; Nanjing Dangjian, 2002). The nal feature unique to China explains the rapid spreading of gating. During the current transition from a planned economic system to a market-oriented one, the government sees maintaining social stability as its topmost political concern, and gating as a quick solution to crime control which directly contributes to stability. Therefore, governments of all levels have included gating residential areas as part of their programmes. For example, the Chinese Communist Partys Central Committee on the Comprehensive Management of Public Security and the Ministry of Public Security have made gating one of the critical measures in evaluating the performance of local governments (Zhong, 1998). In Beijing, three bureaus of the municipal government, including the powerful Bureau of Public Security, jointly issued an order in September 2001 requiring that all residential quarters t to be gated should be so (www.cmen.net, 2002). Under these pressures, local governments specify in their working schedules the number of communities to be gated within certain periods of time. Gating is an important criterion in deciding if a community will be awarded the ofcial title of Civilized and Safe Residential Quarter. All this is hard to imagine in the US, where gated communities are always initialized by the private sector, either the developers or the homeowners. The ofcial sanction of gating in China also makes negative information on the issue hard to nd because Chinese media and researchers tend to avoid contradicting the government. As a result, I have to cite unconventional sources throughout this paper, such as popular magazines on crime stories and grass-roots reports published on the internet and written by local residents ranging from middle-school students to local cadres of the Communist Party.


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Do Gates Work in Chinese Cities? Since security is the main reason for gating in China, how does the measure work to that end? Conicting results have been reported by newspapers and governmental documents. On the one hand, a number of cities or communities claimed that their annual numbers of robbery and burglary cases dropped by as much as 4585% after installing gates and other safety measures (Su, 2000; Zhou, 2000; Hou, 2001; Xiao, 2002). According to newspapers and other ofcial reports, governments encourage gating because it reduces crime without further burdening the police force. A majority of residents like the gate, for it not only increases the sense of security but also eliminates pedlars, noise of through trafc, unwanted salespersons and yers slipped under doors (Ni, 2000; Jia & Wang, 2001). A middle-income residential quarter of 2100 units in suburban Shanghai had a ballot in 1999 to decide if gates should be installed, with 68.5% wanting the gates, 11.3% against them, and 17.7% having no opinion (Ni, 2000). Convinced of the faster sale of units in gated properties, developers ll their advertisement with catchphrases like 24-hour professional protection and intelligent all-sealed management. These favourable reactions to gating echo those found by research on US gated communities (Dillon, 1994, p. 9). A 1996 US survey showed that the more security measures a community had, the more its residents believed that their community was secure (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, p. 125). On the other hand, grass-roots reports revealed that residents of Chinese gated communities privately complained that the walls only provided the image of a safe environment. They offered no guarantee to real safety itself. As the homeowners said: Burning money [the cost of gating] cannot dispel the troubles (Wang et al., 2001). For example, the Xicheng District of Beijing started gating its residential quarters in 1997, but in 1998 there were still 228 robberies and burglaries inside the apartments of those gated communities (Na, 2001). A number of well-publicized robbery- or burglary-related murder cases took place in gated communities. One famous example is the 1995 case at Hot Spring Garden in the suburbs of Beijing, which resulted in the rst litigation in China in which a homeowner sued his condominium management (Mao, 1996). (The owners winning of his case became one of 10 top real-estate news items in 1999.) Other similarly notorious cases were reported in the cities of Chengdu (1993) and Suzhou (1997) (Guo & Zhao, 1998; Yuan et al., 1998). Why do evaluations of gating differ from each other so much? To begin with, we cannot completely trust the positive data because of the crude research methods used in these investigations. For example, social and economic changes other than gating may have contributed to the drop in the crime rate of a certain year. We also should not forget that local ofcers may have inated the numbers to satisfy their superiors. However, there is one more important explanation. Looking closely, it is noticed that the gated communities which had reduced crimes always employed measures other than gates, such as effective human surveillance and patrol. Such human protection is always missing, for a variety of reasons, in walled estates with security problems. Due to the limited income of most Chinese homeowners, residents cannot afford a monthly security service fee of more than 35 yuan (US$0.350.60) per dwelling even in the more developed coastal cities. However, such a fee can only support guards with a monthly salary of 500600 yuan (US$6070), which is



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about half of the average salary in these areas (Sohu.com, 2002; Wang et al., 2001). Thus gated communities, especially those of average income level, nd it hard to recruit enough guards. A 2001 report stated that 95% of gated communities in Beijing could not afford 24-hour guards and patrols, even though more than 60% of robberies and thefts inside the apartments occurred during the night (Na, 2001). In some poor housing developments, management rents the guards rooms to shops in order to supplement their operational funds (Nanjing Dangjian, 2002). When real guards do appear, they are often retired elderly people who lack professional training and are poorly equipped. Such guards usually cannot check every person and car entering and exiting a residential quarter made up of thousands of families. Anyone with an appropriate appearance could easily pass the gate (Han, 2000). This explains how, in a Shanghai gated community, a landlord could lose all the furniture in his rental unit and another homeowner could be burgled three times in one year (Wang et al., 2001). Even with strict control at the entries, gated communities are still vulnerable unless the grounds are constantly patrolled. Without patrolling, a wall cannot deter determined and professional criminals who could easily climb several stories high, as reported in the murder cases cited before. It should also be mentioned that many of the walls were porous. As soon as a criminal jumped into a gated community, as in one of the cases, the walls actually protected the offender from being detected by people on public streets and in neighbouring buildings. Given the enormous size of a typical Chinese residential quarter, however, it is impossible to have human patrols at all places at the same moment, aside from the issue of the communitys ability to pay for such services. The limited effectiveness of gating in crime prevention cited above has been conrmed by US studies (Dillon, 1994, pp. 1112). Research conducted by the police in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, compared crime rate changes in gated and open communities between 1988 and 1989. The research found no signicant differences between the two groups (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, pp. 8498, 122 124).

Cancer of Urban Life Ineffective protection aside, some urban scholars in the US pointed out a more dangerous problem in gatingits side effects upon social life. Physical fences and walls will encourage a compartmentalized society that ceases to promote the Western liberal tradition of sharing of urban public space by different classes to increase mutual understanding and to provide social safety-valves (Davis, 1992, pp. 155156). As Blake and Snyder warned: In an open city, even if somewhat segregated, people of different colors and incomes must negotiate their mutual fate together. In some respects, they learn to value one another more highly, and social networks are expanded. In socially isolated environments, social distance leads to stereotyping and misunderstanding, which in times leads to fear and even greater distance. (1997, p. 138) In Chinese cities, gating does more damage to the sharing of public spaces

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because of the ways Chinese urbanites use these spaces, as shaped by the two unique characteristics of Chinese gated communities mentioned before. First, the high density in Chinese cities limits the private living space in residents apartments. Chinese residents need to rely on parks, cafes and other urban public spaces for conducting social activities which would have taken place in ones backyard in the US. This partially accounts for the much heavier use of urban public space in Chinese cities than in the West (Pellow, 1993, p. 419; Miao, 2001, pp. 1516). Second, limited automobile ownership means that peoples frequent visits to public space rely on walking, bicycling, or riding a bus or other forms of public transit with xed stops. Due to the structural conicts between these unique behaviour patterns and gating, it has been observed that gates cause at least three problems: they reduce social activities on public streets, create dilemma in locating public facilities, and generate inconvenience and inefciency in peoples daily functions. The Deserted Sidewalk Public streets are the main form of civic space in Chinese cities. As is known to urban theorists, social activities only prosper on a street when many people are there (Whyte, 1980, p. 19). Thus, in a sealed residential quarter the true public streets are those along the outside of its borders, because any internal street will not have enough people (also see later discussion about the inside public facilities). Frequent pedestrian access to the sidewalk will encourage people to use it. There are at least two ways to create such pedestrian access: (1) doorways of buildings along a street and (2) intersections between the street and lateral streets or pedestrian paths. The best streets have about them a quality of transparency at their edges, as Allan Jacobs described one of the necessary qualities for what he called great streets. He observed that the best streets are replete with entryways, as little as 12 feet [about 4 metres] apart (Jacobs, 1993, pp. 285286) (Figure 3). As for the importance of street intersections, Jane Jacobs pointed out: Frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighborhood (Jacobs, 1961, p. 186). Allan Jacobs suggested one intersection every 90 metres, as he observed in many successful historic streets, with even closer spacing at busier streets. His survey of major cities in the world shows that most traditional city centres have a distance of about 60100 metres between street intersections (Jacobs, 1993, pp. 302, 262). In contrast to these proven principles, gated communities by their nature do not allow doorways along their boundaries to open directly onto a public street. Due to the large size of master-planned residential quarters in China and the pressure to minimize the number of gates to save guard costs, a commercial street along the boundaries usually has only one intersection every 150250 metres, and the lateral street or pedestrian path could be a gated road itself. If private streets are not counted, or no gates are planned along the public street at all (a common practice when the public street is not zoned commercial), the distance between publicly accessible street intersections could be as much as 500 metres, or the entire side of a residential quarter. To advertise their projects as sealed residential quarters, some developers illegally fenced in planned public streets to make a suburban development grow from large to enormous, prompting forceful reopening of the public streets later by municipal governments (Guangzhou Ribao, 2002). Even in city centres with traditionally dense street


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Figure 3. An old sidewalk in central Shanghai with frequent doorways.

grids, government-sponsored urban renewals often closed up many existing minor streets to create gated communities of larger blocks. For example, 10 such streets disappeared in 1997 in an area of 4.5 square kilometres in Shanghais inner city (Xi & Ma, 1997). The bulgy super-blocks not only prevent local nutrients (the residents) from being fed into the urban vessels, they also reduce visitors from other parts of the city. Because these pedestrians cannot enter the private streets, each gated community poses an obstacle to them, causing long detours (Liu, 2001). In addition to reducing physical access to public streets, gating also induces the psychological barrier of fear toward the outside in residents, discouraging them from venturing beyond the gate. As analysed by Trevor Boddy: In the current environment of drugs, crime, and festering race relations, being inside becomes a powerful symbol for being protected, buttressed, coddled, while being outside evokes exposure, isolation, and vulnerability (Boddy, 1992, p. 139). His theory is echoed in the words of a resident of a Chinese gated community: But as soon as you walk outside of the gate, everything changes. After describing the alienating outside as contrasting with the comfortable inside, for example the trash-laden roads, unregulated pedlars, dirty food stands, robberies and child abductions on the streets, the resident lamented: The guards sent in by the higher-ups can only take care of the safety inside the gate. As for being outside, sorry, you are on your own and be careful. So every morning and evening, you will see such moving scenes at the bridge [at the gate] where adults are escorting their children out and husbands are waiting for their wives to return from

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Both the physical and the psychological barriers prevent people from using the public street, creating a malicious circle wherein the less people use the sidewalk, the less social activities will happen there, and the less attractive to others the street will become. This is why, except for a few sections with markets and bus stops, most parts of public streets surrounding a gated residential quarter often exhibit deserted sidewalks as described at the beginning of the paper, while the markets and other public places in the central city experience overcrowding. These empty sidewalks spell wasted resources and lost opportunities because the high density in Chinese cities, along with Chinese residents traditional dependence upon public space, could easily support more social settings on these currently under-used sidewalks, which would provide a variety of meeting niches for residents from different condominiums. Ironically, the no-mans-land on public streets created by gating actually works against the original purpose of gating, which was to prevent crime. As Oscar Newman demonstrated, one of the most efcient security measures is what he called natural surveillance, or residents constant observation over the public space of a residential area identied as their own community (Newman, 1973, pp. 78101). The lack of people on the public streets outside a gated community makes it much easier for criminals to breach the wall, while the long wall impedes inside residents view over the public sidewalk, which otherwise could have helped to prevent crime on the sidewalk. The Segregated Public Facilities As William H. Whytes research discovered, a successful public place depends on the simultaneous presence and interaction of several factors: people, benches, sun, landscape, food, public attractions, and proximity to a street (and public transportation as in our case) (Whyte, 1980). However, the planning model of the gated residential quarter in China tends to display a split personality in locating its public facilities. To ensure that commercial and educational facilities have a large enough service radius, supermarkets, farmers markets, restaurants and schools have to be located at the peripheries of a residential quarter and open to the bordering public streets, which are often wide arterial corridors. Meanwhile, gating dictates that safe pedestrian areas, green spaces, playgrounds, clubhouses and other community-oriented facilities have to be located in the centre of the walled compound. In the worst cases, planners even included commercial facilities inside the wall, attempting to make a perfect self-sufcient universe. In these planning models, however, things good for a lively public place are divorced from one another. This does not conform to human behaviour and has not worked well in reality. The facilities locked inside the gates have an additional problem. They are hardly genuine public places for they cannot generate social connections among people with enough variety in income level and cultural background due to the limited number of users in one community and the possible homogeneity among them. The pseudo-public places also fail to function as social safety valves because luxury estates often possess underused facilities while less wealthy communities, those built in earlier years, have either minimum public


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Figure 4. Underused public facility in a gated community, Shanghai. amenities or none at all (Figure 4). Many gated communities in Beijing, for instance, prohibited residents children from bringing their peers, who are not residents, to the inside playgrounds (Cai, 2001). Even where several communities were located side by side with similar abilities to provide amenities, resources were not combined to increase the variety of facilities for a more colourful social life. Instead, the gates repeatedly generated similar, minimumlevel facilities (a central green space, sometimes plus a clubhouse) (Wang, L., 2001). The Blockage in Everyday Operations Besides its negative effect on social interactions, gating also creates hardship in residents more essential activities. For example, the elderly, sick persons and parents with children nd it unbearable to run daily errands and visit a clinic outside the gate because the gate is often so far away from apartments in the usually very large compounds and residents tend to walk to their destinations. For this reason unruly residents in some communities have opened holes in the fence to create shortcuts (Ni, 2000; Jia & Wang, 2001). A Western study warned that gating would discourage residents from walking (including walking to a bus stop) and increase their use of automobiles, causing more trafc jams and environmental pollution (Burke, 2001, p. 144). This paints a disturbing future for Chinese cities, for one day cars will be economically available to most families in this populous country. Grass-roots reports further described residents complaints about how gating prevented emergency vehicles from quickly approaching their targets (Wang et al., 2001). Gating also exposed the lovehate relationship between residents and pedlars (such as vegetable hawkers and salvage collectors). Most of the latter are migrants from rural areas in poor inland provinces and are seen as

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potential criminals in permanent residents eyes. However, the pedlars sudden absence after gating immediately inconvenienced many people, for the majority of residents are average-income families reliant on the migrants for inexpensive goods and services. Some gated communities have had to invite selected pedlars back for their services (Jianqi, 1999). In addition to their failure to be true public places, stores and services inside the gates cannot be operated economically due to the diminishing patronage caused by the lack of competitive prices and choices in a society where most residents are still relatively poor. Many residential quarters in Beijing with such inside facilities have been forced to allow outsiders to use them (Beijing Qingnian Bao, 2001). A Comparison with the Traditional City Residents of new gated residential quarters in suburban Shanghai complained about the need for more renqi (the ambiance of people) when comparing their environment to traditional Shanghai neighbourhoods in the city centre. The best way to understand the problems of current gated communities is to see how similar issues were successfully addressed in these historical precedents. The old neighbourhoods consist mainly of lilongs of the 1920s1940s. A lilong is a small walled residential community with rows of townhouses (a variety of the courtyard house) accessible through lanes between the rows. The lanes are narrow, yet wide enough for slow taxis and emergency vehicles. The lilong compound has gates, but usually more than one; and they always remain open, often with a small convenience store nearby to provide informal surveillance. Owners of the store usually live in the same lilong, and sometimes even take care of the cleaning of public areas. Units near the public streets frequently have their front entries open directly onto the sidewalks (Figure 5). On average, a Shanghai lilong community has only 46 dwellings, which is 1/40 to 1/60 of the size of a master-planned residential quarter today (Shen, 1993, pp. 1920, 24). Residents in such a small community can walk to outside stores and bus stops easily and have a strong sense of territoriality because they know their neighbours. Beyond the tiny sizes of the residential compounds themselves, the central city of Shanghai generally has diminutive urban blocks of about 100 by 150 metres in the older areas. Such a rened urban texture creates numerous pedestrian accesses, lilong entries and street intersections, along a street. If you also consider the many stores, newspaper-viewing windows, pocket parks, bus stops and other community facilities on the street, the traditional street is lled with stimuli to people, social activities and natural surveillance (Figure 3). Because of the tight land use inside the lilongs, no public facilities are located within, making the urban street a true public hub gathering a full spectrum of enjoyments. To sum up, instead of letting one issue (such as security) override all other concerns, the unselfconscious design model of lilong responds to multiple functions at the same time and allows each physical element to serve several purposes simultaneously, creating a very convenient and walkable environment for daily domestic activities, and a spatial composition that uses land and other resources efciently. Why Is a Capitalist Model so Popular in China? Even though China has partially adopted a market economy since the 1978



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(b) Figure 5. The lilong compound: a typical plan (a) and photo (b) showing some units with doorways directly opening onto the city street.

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reform, it still sees itself as a socialist state. As a developing country, China has also been slow in accepting many important social, economic and cultural features of an industrial society. How, then, has the gated community, a capitalist concept started in the US no earlier than the 1980s, spread so fast in China? This may be especially puzzling considering that China has a crime rate less than half that of the US (1998 statistics; Troyer & Rojek, 1989, p. 4; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1998, p. 5; Feng, 2001, p. 124). To begin with, the real danger of crime bears no necessary relationship to the fear of crime (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, p. 101). In the US, residents fear actually comes from changes they feel are out of their control, such as the increasingly diverse racial composition of the population and the spreading of poverty into traditional middle-class suburbs. Gates are reassuring in the face of anxiety levels heightened by economic, demographic, and social change. They shield us from a world we feel vulnerable (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, pp. 128129, 145152). Uncontrollable changes are not in short supply to Chinese people since the 1978 reform. Guaranteed employment is gone. Unemployment in Shanghai increased by 52% from 1978 to 2000 (Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, 2001, p. 4). Income level has widened signicantly, with the top 20% of Chinese households in 1994 commanding 50.2% of the national income, which was even higher than that in the capitalist US (44.3%). The rising economic inequality contributed to the 212% increase in recorded crimes from 1979 to 1998 (Cao & Dai, 2001, p. 78; Feng, 2001, pp. 123124). Changes have also occurred in social and cultural realms. Traditional shared values such as communism and Confucianism have lost believers, while no new ideals have been established. Within such a vacuum of shared values, people increasingly focus on personal material wealth rather than any common good, and the society becomes more stratied and tribalized. There is even a Chinese version of ethnical conicts. Since coastal cities usually enjoy a much higher income level than that of inland, rural areas, large numbers of immigrants have owed into these cities. The contrast in living standards between the city and the rural people induces newcomers to commit numerous property offences (50% of criminal cases in Beijing in 1994 were committed by migrants; Ma, 2001, p. 65). Migrants unfamiliar dialects and lifestyles further compound permanent city dwellers distrust and fear of the public space in the city. Therefore, although todays China has maintained a lower crime rate when compared internationally in absolute numbers, Chinese residents increasingly feel insecure as they compare their life with that of yesterday. In the current trying time, it is no wonder gating has been welcomed as an easy solution. But gating also has a deeper root in Chinese culture and urban history, which explains why both residents and the government accept it more quickly than they do other Western ideas. Historically, the Chinese city existed mainly as the outpost of the empire to serve the latters taxation and military needs. As Max Weber pointed out, In contrast to the Occident, the cities in China and throughout the Orient lacked political autonomy. Since the Chinese city was not fundamentally a community or association of its average residents, the prosperity of the Chinese city did not primarily depend upon the citizens enterprising spirit in economic and political ventures but rather upon the imperial administration (Weber, 1951, pp. 1316). Such a peculiar nature produced two profound results in Chinas urban culture. First, the average Chinese urbanite generally lacked participation and even



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Figure 6. Urban development fragmented by work-unit compounds; map of suburban Yichang, Hubei Province.

interest in the public affairs of their city. Second, since there was no incentive and funding for the city government to concern itself too much with municipal functions, road building, re ghting and other items had to rely on the fund-raising and co-ordination of a small number of local gentry, and such efforts were never institutionalized. In general, the Chinese city was thrifty with its civic services. Urban residents had to take care of themselves for a variety of matters, including their own safety (Strand, 1995, pp. 394426). These cultural traits manifested themselves in physical forms as the inwardoriented private spaces (the courtyard houses), the weak interaction between the private and the public (the solid walls anking a street), and the lack of public spaces (such as parks and plazas in a Western city) other than the street. Governmental buildings like the yamen and barracks often took the form of large walled compounds located in the middle of a city, bluntly interrupting local circulation. This tradition appears to have worked well with a variety of political ideologies in Chinese modern history, having been continued from the Imperial period, through the Republican era (19121949), to the Maoist period of the Communist rule (19491976). Before the 1978 reform, the Communist government treated the city in a way not fundamentally different from its predecessors. Based on national strategic plans, the government built factories, universities and other institutions in the city as large, self-sufcient and walled compounds, disregarding their interactions with local urban contexts (Figure 6). The work-unit compound became a miniature city within its own walls, offering residents spaces for work and for play, for home life and for neighborhood life. The highly controlled environment of the work-unit compound is entered through a guarded gate (Gaubatz, 1995,

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pp. 2931). Meanwhile, the existing streets outside the gates and general civic services were left to decay due to the lack of attention and new investment. The reform era after 1978 did see the walls of the work-unit compounds being penetrated by numerous stores operated by private entrepreneurs. However, without substantial political reform and cultural self-examination, old habits, such as the publics aloof attitude toward community affairs, die hard. Appointed by the national government, municipal ofcials tend to focus on the most eye-catching projects of infrastructure improvement or urban beautication. They are happy to let local communities work out their own mundane problems as much as possible. Compared to the previous era, civic services have been modernized but still remain far behind those of Western industrial cities. For example, the US had an approximately 20% larger professional police force per 10 000 residents than China did at the end of the 1990s, not to mention the larger gaps in equipment and training (Bracey, 1989, p. 130; US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993). If gating is criticized by the liberal tradition within Western societies, no such balancing force exists in China. Without the Western tradition of urban association and sufcient policing, average residents sense of self-protection easily outweighs the value of social interaction. Compartmentalized urban space has quickly reappeared in the form of the gated community. Its current popularity in the US only adds a halo of modernization around this selective learning from the West. Even the migrant population have formed their own gated communities, such as the famous Zhejiang Village in Beijing, about 48 walled compounds accommodating nearly 40 000 people from Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province (Zhang, Li, 2001, pp. 201222). A Chinese commentator saw the irony and asked: in the reform years when many old walls, both physical and social, are being demolished, how come more and more new walls are being built around peoples homes? (Wu, 2000). In contrast to the open and global city the authority wants to paint Beijing as for the 2008 Olympic Games, another writer warned: The Imperial City and the Forbidden City in history were neither open nor global, they existed only for one person, the emperor; from the 50s to the 70s of the 20th century, Beijing was developed as one huge yard after another, such as the First Factory of Machine Tools; now the developers have been the new player in urban development since the 80s, but they emphasize sealed management of residential quarters. The segregation of different times and forms have brought many problems to Beijings urban space. (Liu, 2001) Defensible Building Group: An Alternative Design Model Is there any way to satisfy peoples need for protection while avoiding the problematic gating? Some US critics of the gated community, such as Mike Davis, offer no help other than dismissing residents fear as purely the product of media and security industries hype. Davis even claimed that the security measure itself insinuates crimes (Davis, 1990, pp. 224226). These arguments can hardly dissuade residents from gating either in the US or in China, for certainly there are things in the world we could decide to avoid without actually tasting them rst. Fear is real. As Blakely and Snyder pointed out: Whatever the actual threat of crime, fear in and of itself negatively affects families,


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(a)

(b)

Figure 7. A comparison between residential districts composed of building groups (a) and of gated residential quarters (b); each quarter is sub-divided into residential clusters); black areas are commercial, hatched areas are parks and other public facilities, and dotted area is the shared street. neighborhoods, and quality of life. It must be addressed (1997, p. 101). They and others suggested alternative physical and social solutions to prevent crime and control trafc in the US context, some of which may even have universal implication (Zelinka & Brennan, 2001). However, no research on the gated community has been found in Chinese planning literature, and many planners and architects probably still consider it a necessary direction. Learning from the traditional city and emerging trends in recent practice, the following four design recommendations will try to offer some solutions from the physical perspective and for new construction only; the proposals are specially tailored to the physical, cultural and economic realities in current Chinese cities. Together the concepts suggest a new planning-design model to replace the current prototype of the sealed residential quarter (Figure 7). Some ideas in my proposals have also been mentioned by a few Chinese scholars and practitioners, but their discussions were not aimed at our topic and did not question the segregation between a sealed residential quarter and its urban context (Bai, 1999, pp. 3032; Chen, 2001, pp. 5657). My presentation will be illustrated by a 1999 planning proposal I prepared for a new residential quarter in suburban Shanghai (Figure 8). Building Group as the Defensible Cell To address the safety need, it is necessary to have a checkpoint between ones private area and the public realm. But gating an entire neighbourhood will only have the social side effects mentioned above, without increasing any protection. Instead, we should set the line of defence around one or a few buildings (apartment buildings or townhouses). As the self-defensible cell in the proposed urban fabric, such a building group is entirely walled with no more than two guarded or self-closing gates. Much smaller than the residential cluster of


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Figure 8. Planning Scheme for No. 1 Neighbourhood, Middle Block of Jinqiao Estate, Pudong, Shanghai (1999) by Pu Miao: defensible building groups with entries on streets, smaller urban blocks and many through paths; stores along a collector street (on the right) with community facilities at the rear of the stores and facing a park.


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300800 units in Chinese planning codes, the building group will only contain about 100150 units so it is neither too small to sustain a pre-school childrens playground nor too large to be perceived as a community (Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986, pp. 35, 143). We should avoid as much as possible placing public facilities in the group to make it self-sufcient. The maximum facilities inside a group will probably be no more than the tot lot, a small outdoor sitting area for the elderly, and bicycle parking, which need to be near the residences. Each building group can contract its maintenance with a management company of its own choice, or multiple groups can share one service provider to cut costs, but the security of each group must be controlled individually. In my scheme, the two gates can be supervised by a single attendant. The gates should open directly to the streets outside. Due to the reduced size of the building group, the urban block containing it could remain small too. The sides of each block in the proposed scheme are 150 metres long and contain two building groups, creating one building entry or street intersection about every 70 metres along the adjacent sidewalk. No Private Streets The public should be able to enter all of the streets (or pedestrian paths). All public facilities should be located on streets (see below for more details), so that the streets become a genuine public realm rather than the fake public image of streets within a gated community. Following the traditional manner in which Chinese urban parks have been operated, some of the more costly facilities may charge a users fee to sustain themselves. The streets could take the form of cul-de-sac, loop or other similar patterns to suggest a sense of territory if so desired, provided that through pedestrian paths are spaced no more than 100150 metres apart. The pedestrian paths do not have to be in rigid rectangular grids, as long as they do not cause disorientation and long detours. A Shared Street as the Public Hub Not all streets should be treated the same. Most are residential streets for people to have a leisurely walk, with playgrounds and small sitting areas but no commercial facilities except for one or two convenience stores or cafes. Only a few commercial streets will act as the major public centres, following the long urban tradition in Chinese cities. The current concentration of commercial facilities along the arteries at the borders of a residential quarter has created hazards for people from communities on the other side of the street. The public centre should be in the centre of a residential district, in the form of a shared street used by pedestrians, bicycles and slow vehicles such as taxis and buses (Blakely & Snyder, 1997, pp. 167168). Parks, squares, community centres, schools and other cultural or educational facilities should be near the shared street, probably accessible through large openings in the buildings fronting the street, in order to form a multi-functional environment where people can satisfy all of their needs in one place. As for the sidewalk along the arteryit should be designed just as one of the strolling paths. Eliminating the Residential Quarter Linking the above three points together suggests a total rejection of the current

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planning and development unit of a large and standardized residential quarter (and its sub-divisions, the residential clusters), the product of a planned economy. A residential district will be directly composed of building groups as its basic cells. In relation to the increasingly market-oriented society, such small cells facilitate incremental formation of a development parcel. The exibility will not only allow for projects of various sizes to suit the different capacities of real-estate developers, thus breaking the current monopoly of large state capitals, but also encourage diverse housing types, varied social characters, and sensitive responses to unique site conditions. A development could appear as a loose cluster of building groups if so desired, but the cluster must be penetrable by pedestrians. In particular, governmental regulations and bank lending policies should be established to discourage over-sized and standardized projects. In the end, a lived-in residential district should not appear as a map of real-estate companies territories, but rather cells connected by an all-encompassing street network through which people can freely access any public place. The less structured pattern encourages chance encounters on the streets, allows more choices in shopping, and accommodates more changes in the future (such as that in the service radius of an elementary school).

Conclusion: A Challenge beyond Architecture The problems of the gated community and their solutions are far beyond the scope of what physical designs can answer. If streets are to be returned to the public, the municipal government must provide professional patrols on these streets, which, with improved citizen surveillance, will reduce crime. Shared by a population larger than that of any gated residential quarter, the cost of professional policing should be more economic than what residents now pay in a gated community. But all of this will not happen without political reform to increase governments accountability to the average residents needs and public education to improve Chinese residents appreciation of social co-operation. Some developers in China are already celebrating that, after the work-unit compound, the open residential quarter from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the current gated community of mixed income levels, an advanced fourth phase of Chinese urban housing is on the horizon; that is, a residential area not only walled, but also designed exclusively for a specic class and its shared interests and values (Tianjin Daily, 2000). This means that the Chinese urban space will be more fragmented and Balkanized, isolating different groups from each other and eventually pitting one against another. In the post-cold-war era, we need to question whether Chinese cities have to indiscriminately model themselves after the US urban patterns, without rst separating the good from the questionable, such as the gating. ReferencesBai (1999) Guanyu Xiaoqu Guimo He Jiegou De Tantao [On the size and structure of the residential quarter], Architectural Journal, 6, pp. 3032. Beijing Qingnian Bao (2001) Xiaoqu Sheshi Nengfou Duiwai Kaifang [Can the facilities of residential quarters be open to outside?], Beijing Qingnian Bao (Beijing Youth), 25 December. Blakely, E. J. & Snyder, M. G. (1997) Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washinton, DC, Brookings Institute Press).


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Boddy, T. (1992) Underground and overhead: building the analogous city, in: M. Sorkin (Ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, p. 139 (New York, Hill & Wang). Bracey, D. H. (1989) Policing the Peoples Republic, in: R. J. Troyer, J. P. Clark & D. G. Rojek (Eds) Social Control in the Peoples Republc of China, p. 130 (New York, Praeger). Burke, M. (2001) The pedestrian behavior of residents in gated communities, in: Australia: Walking the 21st Century, p. 144, available at: http://www.transport.wa.gov.au/conferences/walking Cai, F. (2001) Yegai Tingting Haizi De Shengyin [Listen to childrens voice], Beijing Qingnian Bao (Beijing Youth), 1 June. Cao, L. & Dai, Y. (2001) Inequality and crime in China, in: J. Liu, L. Zhang & S. F. Messner (Eds) Crime and Social Control in a Changing China, p. 78 (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press). Chen, F. (2001) Bianyuan Shequ Zhong De Xinchengshi Zhuyi [The neo-urbanism in edge communities], Architectural Journal, 1, pp. 5657. Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, Verso). Davis, M. (1992) Fortress Los Angeles: the militarization of urban space, in: M. Sorkin (Ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, pp. 155156 (New York, Hill & Wang). Dillon, D. (1994) Fortress America, Planning, 60(6), pp. 9, 1112. Federal Bureau of Investigation (1998) Crime in the United States, 1998: Uniform Crime Reports, p. 5, available at: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius 98/98crime/98cius05.pdf Feng, S. (2001) Crime and crime control in a changing China, in: J. Liu, L. Zhang & S. F. Messner (Eds) Crime and Social Control in a Changing China, pp. 123124 (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press). Gaubatz, P. R. (1995) Urban transformation in post-Mao China: impacts of the Reform Era on Chinas urban form, in: D. S. Davis, R. Kraus, B. Naughton & E. J. Perry (Eds) Urban Space in Contemporary China, pp. 2931 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Guangzhou Ribao (2002) Guangzhou: Xiaoqulu Bian Shizheng Guihualu, Shimin Huhuan Zhiqingquan [Guangzhou: private roads became public, residents demand for pre-disclosure], Guangzhou Ribao [Guangzhou Daily], 28 January. Guo, X. & Zhao, B. (1998) Zhuizong Emo [Track the devil], Democracy and Law, 9, pp. 1618. Han, J. (2000) Gaoceng Feidao Qiao Jingzhong [Flying thief in high-rises alarmed residents], Guangming Daily, 9 November. Hou, Z. (2001) Wenzhou Shi Chuangjian Fengbishi Anquan Wenming Xiaoqu Jianwen [Sealed safe and civilized residential quarters in Wenzhou], Legal Daily, 5 September. Jacobs, A. (1993) Great Streets (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press). Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, Vintage Books). Jia, X. & Wang, X. (2001) Hujiayuan Dazao Xiandaihua Xinshequ [Hujiayuan creates a new modern community], Beijing Daily, 15 December. Jianqi (1999) Xiaoqu Fengbi You Shangji [Sealed residential quarters have commercial opportunities), Peoples Daily, 30 August. Liu, J. (2001) Chengshi Huoli Yuanzi Kaifang [Urban vitality comes from openness], Fangchan [House], 15 October. Ma, G. (2001) Population migration and crime in Beijing, China, in: J. Liu, L. Zhang & S. F. Messner (Eds) Crime and Social Control in a Changing China, p. 65 (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press). Mao, L. (1996) Basui Youtong Zhuanggao Wenquan Bieshu [Eight-year-old sues hot spring garden], Democracy and Law, 11, pp. 2629. Marcus, C. C. & Sarkissian, W. (1986) Housing As If People Mattered: Site Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press). Miao, P. (2001) Introduction, in: P. Miao (Ed.) Public Places in Asia Pacic Cities: Current Issues and Strategies, pp. 1516 (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic). Na, R. (2001) Keji Fangfan Bao Pinggan [Technology secured safety], Legal Daily, 31 January. Nanjing Dangjian (2002) Untitled report, Nanjing Dangjian [Communist Party Work in Nanjing], available at: http://www.njdj.gov.cn/adx/mainarticle.jsp?article id 130, 22 February. National Bureau of Statistics of China (2001) China Statistical Yearbook 2001 (Beijing, China Statistics Press). Newman, O. (1973) Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (New York, Collier Books). Ni, G. (2000) Shefang De Xincun [Defensible residential villages], Xin Jinshan News, 29 July. Pellow, D. (1993) No place to live, no place to love: coping in Shanghai, in: G. Guldin & A. Southall (Eds) Urban Anthropology in China, p. 419 (Leiden, E.J. Brill).


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