Urban Boundaries, Social Barriers: A Benchmark and Vision-Centric Framework for Mapping Gated Communities and Equity Implications

Communities are fundamental spatial units that shape urbanform and social life. Whether a residential compound is spatially openor enclosed affects mobility, access to public services, and equity, yetstudies of Chinese fengbi xiaoqu remain largely qualitative or small-scale,limiting reproducible city-scale analysis. We address this gap by introduc-ing GBA-GCs, a metropolitan-scale multimodal benchmark for locallygrounded gated/open community recognition in China’s Greater BayArea, covering 37,444 residential compounds with aligned boundary poly-gons, high-resolution satellite imagery, Chinese metadata, and structuredattributes, together with expert-verified labels, inter-annotator reliability,and official evaluation splits. Built on this benchmark, we present Multi-modal Classifier for Gated Community (MCGC), a vision-centricmultimodal framework based on DINOv3-SAT that fuses imagery, text,and structured cues via modality-aware cross-attention and adaptivegating to mitigate modality imbalance. MCGC consistently outperformsstrong unimodal and multimodal baselines. Finally, we apply the validatedmodel to metropolitan-scale mapping and report equity-oriented findingsincluding spatial clustering of GCs, privatized green space, and reducedpedestrian connectivity. The benchmark, code, and release documentationare available at https://github.com/MinweiZhao/GBA-GCs.