Author : Choon-Piew Pow
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 21,37 MB
Release : 2009-09-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 113402097X
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.
Author : Beibei Tang
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 31,12 MB
Release : 2017-10-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1351630024
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.
Author : Rong Chen (M.C.P.)
Publisher :
Page : 55 pages
File Size : 27,51 MB
Release : 2014
Category :
ISBN :
Contemporary gated communities in China have only risen to prominence over the past two decades since the Housing Reform and market economy. Research on this field mainly criticize Chinese gated community on their negative social impacts by directly borrowing arguments from the studies of Western gated communities, especially from the US counterparts. However, the socioeconomic connotation attached to gated communities in the US is not necessarily applicable to gating in the Chinese cases. Conceptions of cities in the US as the leading parts of this Chinese urban trend thus have to be questioned and investigated. This paper aims at analyzing the formation of Chinese gated community based on its unique historical context and socioeconomic conditions, and constructing a study framework to measure the degree of openness with its social impact. The historical formation of this peculiar spatial layout derived from a centralized administration concern, which in turn blended into the traditional value as a symbol of social order and belonging. As people's preferences for residence follow the historical traditions and customs, the way residents perceive gatedness is different from the opinions of the Western liberals. Moreover, the current socioeconomic environment contributes to distinguishing the specificities of Chinese urbanization process. The common interests shared by local government, private developers and customers prompt the prevalence of gated communities around the country. Translating the spatial language into measurable quantitative index enables the dissection of the gating phenomenon for objective openness degree assessment. As Chinese gated communities account for a large proportion of the land development, a comprehensive understanding of the measurable openness degree based on local context will better facilitate the research on Chinese gated communities and the rapid urbanization process.
Author : Thomas Heberer
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 26,50 MB
Release : 2011-03-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1136808434
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.
Author : Luigi Tomba
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 43,13 MB
Release : 2014-08-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0801455197
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.
Author : Colleen Chiu-Shee
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,94 MB
Release : 2022
Category :
ISBN :
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.
Author : Ray Yep
Publisher : Edward Elgar Publishing
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 31,3 MB
Release :
Category :
ISBN : 1786431637
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.
Author : Peter G. Rowe
Publisher : Birkhäuser
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 43,61 MB
Release : 2016-06-06
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 3035607060
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.
Author : Feng Frederic Deng
Publisher :
Page : 13 pages
File Size : 16,24 MB
Release : 2014
Category :
ISBN :
Researches on the gated community in Chinese cities have been growing very fast, but empirical studies are limited, especially those on the relationship between gated community and housing segregation. Three micro-districts in Chongqing are selected for the questionnaire survey. Retrospective questions are included to obtain information about the homeowners' condition before moving into the gated communities, and then by comparing it with their current situation we can estimate the impact of the gated community on housing segregation. The survey found that, after moving into the gated communities, many homeowners' familiarity with the neighbors and their contact with other people decreases. It is also found that homeowners' participation in local public affairs decreases. This supports the view that gated community aggravates housing segregation. However, the survey also found that many homeowners feel the income differences among the neighbors increase and the changes of several types of their external activities don't show a consistent pattern. All these evidence suggests a complex relationship between gated community and housing segregation in Chinese cities and the removal of danwei from the housing system affects people's experience in the gated community.
Author : Li Zhang
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 35,75 MB
Release : 2012-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0801458196
A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China. Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era. New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.
