Change and continuity: a morphological investigation of the creation of gated communities in post-reform Beijing

Alongside the socio-economic restructuring from a central planning system to a free market system, Beijing is being transformed into a “gated city of tomorrow” by building massive gated communities as a new form of private neighborhood planning and design. Although certain scholarly attentions have been received through the international debate over gated communities, there is a lack of systematic research on how these private urban landscapes are actually created at the micro-level and how their creation is related with historical development and social process. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the origin and nature of the creation of gated communities in the setting of Beijing through a careful morphological investigation. More exactly, a set of private gated community schemes and a set of public produced neighborhood schemes of the early socialist period will be cross compared according to the major neighborhood morphological components in order to reveal the differences and similarities in their morphology, or in another sense the change and continuity in their planning and design. Meanwhile, the ideas and logics underpinning the changes will be accounted. Finally, design origins and the links between the morphological changes and the broad social process will be discussed in light of the research findings