Speaker
Description
This paper highlights a critical challenge: although metro projects are rationalised to enhance accessibility—a fundamental public good—the benefits of new metros are often captured by gated communities in China. As of 2022, 53 cities have metro lines with a total network length of 9,584 km. Metro infrastructure is a vital component of the "land-infrastructure-leverage" strategy—a response to mounting fiscal pressures in local governments that commonly devise financing vehicles, utilising land as collateral for bank loans and market borrowings to fund large-scale infrastructure projects. Besides financial burden, rapid metro expansion has brought many other challenges to the cities, including pedestrian accessibility to stations being compromised by large-block gated communities. Gated communities, by definition and due to geometric and economic necessity, tend to segregate urban physical structures and spaces, especially if they are located around metro stations. The large, gated blocks emerging from China’s contemporary property market create impermeability and shrink the new metro’s accessibility – the fundamental local public good the metro provides. They force walking to/from the metro to take longer, more unpleasant routes along the arterials. This undermines transit-oriented development principles such as walkability and high-quality urban design in station areas. The impermeable gated morphology around metro stations has not yet been studied as a general urban configuration trend, the housing outcome of the land-infrastructure-leverage that may work against the basic justification of metro-city building in China.
We conducted a rigorous analysis using longitudinal data and a natural experiment research design to investigate the spatial and temporal relationship between the metro expansion and the emergence of gated communities around stations in the southeast inland Chinese city of Nanchang. We use the metro lines that are being planned but have yet to receive approval to structure a natural experiment research design. Our methodology included spatial mapping and difference-in-difference approaches to identify causality and measure the extent of metro-induced gated communities through treatment-control group comparisons. We observed a significant increase in gated communities along new metro lines. The distribution of gated communities in 1600m buffer areas surrounding metro stations increased from pre-metro construction (2009, 140 gated communities) until the completion of the four metro projects in Nanchang (2023, with 821 gated communities). Our modelling identified, on average, eight additional gated communities were built around a new station, with the total area of gated community compounds in station catchments increasing by 0.5 km². This metro-induced treatment effect remained significantly high for up to six years after line construction.
For over two decades, land financing has been a pivotal force in shaping urban infrastructure provision in China. Our findings suggest that China's current land-infrastructure leverage strategy, relying on land financing to finance urban infrastructure, limits the long-term benefits of costly metro investments and constitutes a significant and enduring planning failure. We argue that this issue of ‘accessibility capture’ by gated communities is driven by public sector behaviour, which we term a ‘capital-recovery paradox’—where the public goals used to justify metro projects are sidelined in pursuit of short-term financing solutions. The irony may be even greater as the ‘capture’ is motivated more by local government’s financing needs than by the preferences of gated community residents to live within walking distance of a station. Addressing an endemic problem in current Chinese planning, our research findings have broad implications for international audiences to inform urban design and housing policy to transit-oriented developments in developing cities. Our study contributes to the global debate on infrastructure-led land and housing development, the design of policy instruments, and the understanding of potential displacement and gentrification issues in transportation infrastructure.
References
Sun, G., & Webster, C. (2024). Are gated communities capturing the lion’s share of metro accessibility? The path dependence, localised bargaining, and institutional outcomes in financing the development-oriented transit in China. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
He, D., Sun, G., Li, L., & Webster, C. (2024). New metro and housing price and rent premiums: A natural experiment in China. Urban Studies, 61(7), 1371-1392.
| Keywords | Land Financing, gated communities, infrastructure planning, natural experiment, causal evidence |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
