The security grills on apartments in gated communities: Trading-off 3D and 2D landscapes of fear in China

In China, as elsewhere, gates are symbolically or actually associated with an escape from crime and insecurity. The manifest phenomenon of security grills on apartments inside gated communities, as a recent retrofitting, is not well understood. We conducted a household survey of 2404 participants in 46 communities in a city, to investigate why China's gated community apartments have ubiquitously installed security grills. Results show gated communities have relatively low crime rates, but 84% of residents believed their gates could not prevent penetration by non-residents. For a unit increase of the belief in the inefficacy of 2D security (community's gates and guards) when holding other factors at a fixed value, there is an 18% increase in the probability of trading-off to install 3D security (grills on the individual apartment). The prevalence of apartment-based security grills, representing a phase-change in the dominant mode of the landscape of fear, is highly relevant to current ungating policy context that is urging a rethink about gated community development.