Morphology of the gated : questions of territorial fragmentations in low and high density landscapes - a comparison between Hong Kong and Tshwane (Pretoria)

The questions of gated communities are nothing novel or unique to the contemporary urban landscape. Urban enclaves or gated communities have become part and parcel to the types of contemporary development both in terms of an urbanization model and accepted form of public life. More specifically the forms of spatial complexity associated to each urban landscape reflects a specific 'form' of territorial structuring impacting an explicit morphological modularity which radically reconceptualises the neighbourhood, urban block, plot and building. Hong Kong's territorial constructs and its affective abandonment of the city surface favour the elevated 'podium' complex, producing both island enclaves of commercial and domestic hybridization. Tshwane's territorial construct radicalizes the scales of the street, block and plot, internalizing the social and commercial communities through its extraction of activities from the urban street. Building a critique from the French Morphological tradition, and its reading of social-spatial complexity and the city, this paper problematizes the differences of gated morphologies for low density (South Africa) and high density (Hong Kong) landscapes. Secondly, it offers a unique comparison to the various morphological complexities of gated communities as models of urbanization in the 21st Century, mechanizing both disciplines of architecture and urban planning to critique the morphological expressions of gating in developmental strategies.