This photo was taken at about 6 pm on a weekday afternoon. You can see from the strollers and toddlers in arms, and the younger ages of the adults that this is a family neighborhood. The buildings across the street are in the gated community where I lived for a year. There is an identical such community to my back as I take this photo. There are other such communities that stretch for miles around, all of which have been built in the last ten years.
In the fall of 2015, I moved into an apartment in one of the early new neighborhoods in Nanjing. It was very different from the traditional urban neighborhood I had lived in for most of the previous three years. Instead of being open and interlaced with small streets, bounded by large city streets, this was a gated community with at least 20 residential buildings, ranging from 10 to 20 floors. The buildings were spaced apart with park-like sidewalks, grassy areas and planted trees and bushes. I always enjoy the public spaces in all Chinese neighborhoods, and this was no exception. In the afternoons after school, the children would play in the open plaza, and in the evenings, women would do dancing to music for exercise.
The apartment I lived in belonged to a church friend; she had never lived in the apartment, perhaps it was bought as an investment, or for their future retirement. Her husband's parents had lived there a few times, some months at a time, but they preferred to live most of the time in their old hometown in a northern province, where their longtime friends lived. At the time I lived there, it was completely furnished, but it was unoccupied. My friends refused any payment, for rent or utilities. They were very gracious.
It was a large apartment, with a very large living room, a large master bedroom, and two smaller bedrooms, with two baths, a nice kitchen and a wide area for the washing machine and long bars from which to hang clothes to dry. I mostly worked in either the living room or in my small bedroom. I was quite comfortable.
While this neighborhood is not as far from the city center as many of the more recent residential areas, I still had to allow about 1 to 1 1/2 hours to get downtown or to church, which was a few blocks southeast of downtown. First, I walked from the sixth floor apartment (of course, with elevator, since there were ten floors in that building) to the gate that exited to a normal public street; then, I walked six-tenths of a mile to a bus stop at an incredibly large wholesale home furnishings mall at one end and a small modern shopping mall at the other end. This facility was two bus stops long - that's long. I took the appropriate bus five stops to a subway station. This subway line, Line 3, would take me under the Yangzi River, the third longest in the world, past many stations that I could take to other destinations or to change to other lines, to a station only three blocks from my church. I would walk from there, but I could have taken a city bus that stopped directly in front of the church, or there are ride-share bicycles now at that station.
There were no shops inside the community, but just outside the gate, as you can see from the photo above, there are many shops and restaurants. There are several convenience stores, beauty shops, a cleaners, and restaurants. There is a child care/kindergarten facility built into one corner of the block. You can see from the above photo, the people most likely to move to these new residential neighborhoods are young families. Most of the older people in the neighborhood are grandparents living with their adult children, caring for the grandchildren, those too young to go to kindergarten, or to meet primary school children, sometimes for lunch, if that is not offered at school, walking them home and then back to school, and again at the end of the day, because the parents probably work in town or in another suburb and leave home early and get home late.
But if you want more than is offered in the neighborhood shops, in the small mall that I mentioned, there are: a Walmart, a Starbucks, KFC, Burger King, clothing stores, cosmetics stores, and on and on. There is a floor for nice restaurants, not just a food court, a floor for children's clothing, toys, and educational activities, and shops for most of the kinds of things you would expect in any mall. This is far from the largest mall in Nanjing, of which there are many.
I only lived here for a year, but I enjoyed this home also, I enjoyed seeing young families around me and I learned how to get around town on the subway system, which is constantly expanding. I enjoyed the convenience of walking for exercise: in nice weather, the broad sidewalks and long blocks were scenic and smooth; in the winter, I went to the wholesale home furnishings mall and walked the halls, entertained by all the beautiful and elaborate goods for sale. But, I found the distance to town to be more troublesome than perhaps did the families who lived around me, because their lifestyle was more routine and structured, given their obligations of family and work. So I moved back into town, this time into a high-rise building overlooking the heart of downtown Nanjing.