> Residential districts in China and many former Soviet countries. Big concrete blocks, with the bottom floor lined with small stores. They're absolutely delightful places to live.

That really isn’t true. At least in China, the most common living arrangement in big cities is the gated apartment complex, their might be some retail on floor one, but it is usually on the other side of the gate, and the gate you can enter or exit from is often not conveniently located to access that retail easily (given my experiences living in Beijing). If they did away with the fences/gates, things would be much more convenient.