ABSTRACT
Barely a mile away from the runway of Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport in the Minhang District, a huge tract of suburban housing estate dominates what was formerly an 800 mu (over 50 hectares) plot of paddy-field. Comprising a mix of high-rise apartments, townhouses and villas, the privately developed and owned housing estate known locally as ‘Vanke Garden City’ is arguably Shanghai’s first large-scale ‘middle-class’ housing enclave built by Vanke Property Development, one of China’s most prestigious housing developers.1 Notwithstanding its location near a noisy airport, Vanke Garden City has, over the years, proven to be immensely popular with ‘new middle-class’ home-buyers and is widely regarded as an icon representing the dawn of Shanghai’s modern commercial housing development in the 1990s. Surrounded by 2-metre-high wrought-iron gates and concrete walls around its perimeter, the suburban private housing enclave comes equipped with high-tech surveillance technologies and is guarded round-theclock and patrolled by more than 280 privately employed security guards on site. A prominent sign erected outside the main entrance announces in bold Chinese characters that the premises belong to a private community and non-residents are not allowed to enter. Another sign at the front gate further proclaims that the
gated commodity housing enclave belongs to a select group of ‘Model Civilized Residential Quarters’ (shifan wenming xiaoqu) that have been hand-picked by local district officials as exemplary of a ‘civilized’ modern living environment. Within the enclave, all housing clusters have electronic gated access and residents pay a monthly maintenance fee to enjoy condominium facilities such as swimming pool, club house, tennis courts, spas, landscape gardens and, all in all, a ‘new lifestyle’ (xinshenghuo fangshi) for those who can afford the escalating prices of commercial housing in Shanghai. In Vanke Garden City, commercial house prices have more than doubled over the past years, with prices now ranging from 800,000 yuan to over 3 million yuan.2
