Author:  Shuhai Zhang, Jie Tang, Wan Li, Guo Zheng

Abstract: Since residents' sense of safety relates to residential welfare, it has been a primary reference for land use, planning, community policy, etc. This paper focuses on whether enclosed rural communities can improve residents' sense of safety. We distinguish and contribute to existing research through an empirical analysis of gated communities in a rural area of Beijing (gated villages). With quantitative data acquired from a questionnaire survey of 3480 respondents, a logistic model was employed to estimate the effects of gating on residents' perceptions of safety. The results demonstrate that gating itself does not contribute to improving residents' sense of safety. However, the construction of facilities resulting from gated village policy significantly improves residents' sense of safety. The findings reveal the potential mechanism for safety provision in rural area. First, the booming migrant population has broken the tight social relations that used to act as the key element in guaranteeing rural safety. Instead, gated villages have now emerged as an alternative – to maintain safety by establishing a series of facilities and organisations. As a result, a shift from social-relation-based safety provision to facilities-based safety provision is visible.

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275119306699