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