Moving beyond conventional accounts of gated communities and housing segregation, this book interrogates the moral politics of urban place-making in China's commodity housing enclaves. Drawing on fieldwork and survey conducted in Shanghai, Pow critically demonstrates how gated communities are bound up in the cultural reproduction of middle-class landscape that is entrenched in the politics of the good life - defined in terms of a highly segregated landscape secured and maintained through the territorialisation of privilege, lifestyle and private property.

The study...