Choon-Piew Pow 2009: Gated Communities in China: Class, Privilege and the Moral Politics of the Good Life

摘要

Pow's timely and balanced book deserves a wide audience. Gated communities have surely become a kind of folk devil for many urbanists and the troublesome target of much analytical thinking on the changing landscape of cities. Excluding non-residents from spaces that would ordinarily be considered to be public rights of way, they also present real and symbolic barriers emphasizing forms of social separation founded on differences in taste, demographics (such as the exclusion of families) and, critically, income.