ABSTRACT
Luxury gated communities in China now number in the hundreds. For example, 250 luxury villa estates have appeared around Beijing in the last 20 years; the number reaches 145 on the outskirts of Shanghai; Chengdu, the capital of the distant province of Sichuan, has 52 gated communities.1 Nevertheless, private and secured residential communities centered on a golf course are much rarer here than they are in the United States. The gated golf communities occupy the most luxurious sector of the market. In addition, these gated golf communities represent a very particular type of territory in the context of China: large-sized spaces with particularly low residential density and low forms of housing in a country which is, on the contrary, characterized by very high population densities, an extreme rarity of available land (notably in eastern China and around large cities) and a general verticality in urban shapes. These communities consume not only land but also water to an excessive degree. In such conditions, these territories, which combine residential and recreational
functions, bring up serious issues in numerous domains such as urban planning and the environment, and thus lead to debates in the press. The objective of this study is to analyze these Chinese gated golf communities with a principally geographic approach.2 First, the study presents the phenomenon of gated golf communities and shows that it fits into a wider historical evolution. Examples of gated golf communities in the United States and in France will be discussed in order to put the Chinese case into perspective. Then, the chapter identifies the specificities of this type of community in China and brings to light the multiple property, political, and environmental issues that they involve (Wu 2006a,b). The chapter also presents a typology of gated golf communities in China, contrasting the golf villas in intra-urban settings, then in suburban and outlying areas, and finally in rural (or perimetropolitan) settings.
