ABSTRACT
After the end of China’s egalitarianist Maoist period, a point marked by the 1978 reforms, a process of socio-spatial differentiation started on every scale-inter-and intraregional, between towns and regions and within urban spaces. The recent phenomenon of luxury villa areas on the outskirts of large cities makes such disparities tangible. These peri-metropolitan micro-territories, which have been little investigated, reveal the extreme form that economic disparities may take in China. They bear clear similarities to the gated communities found in the United States and elsewhere and sit strangely alongside the pre-reform Chinese urban landscape.
