ABSTRACT
Throughout this book so far, I have examined the contested place-making strategies in Shanghai’s gated communities and demonstrated how these privileged middle-class landscapes, far from being neutral and innocent, are implicated in a territorial politics of exclusion. In this penultimate chapter, I aim to bring together all these themes and issues that have been raised earlier in the book to address a fundamental concern of this study: how people’s endeavours to shape places according to certain normative ideas and images feed into the territorial politics of exclusion that potentially undermine the normative ideals of openness and diversity in modern urban life. In the process, what kinds of geographical-moral issues are being implicated with the development of gated communities? More specifically, how do housing landscapes in Shanghai’s gated communities conform to the desired visions and aspirations of its residents to include and exclude different social groups; and, corollary to that, how do social-spatial differentiations such as those observed in Shanghai’s fortified middle-class enclaves disrupt, challenge and unsettle the normative ideals of city life (emphasizing openness and diversity). By engaging with some of these normative issues, this chapter aims to tease out some of the moral complexities and ambiguities of middle-class place-making in Shanghai.
