Gated Community

A gated community is a specific form of residential development that is becoming increasingly widespread in many developed and some developing countries. In the most inclusive definitions, a gated community is described as a residential area surrounded by a wall or other means of enclosure, with access controlled at a gate. Specialists require two added criteria. The residential area must be governed by a local governing body, a community association, which is a contractual association responsible for ensuring adherence to regulations and for providing local civic goods and services and whose resources derive from fees paid by the residents. The gated community must also have amenities or infrastructures that are normally publicly owned and operated, such as a park or a street, but are in this case privately held and maintained.

There are different typologies of gated communities. Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder define three main categories: (1) security zones—characterized by restricted access alone; (2) lifestyle communities—which offer amenities, most often recreational (tennis courts, golf clubs, etc.), as well as restricted access; and (3) prestige communities—which offer their elite membership the distinction of living in an especially desirable location.

There are various forms of gated communities in many widely differing countries such as the United States, China, South Africa, or Brazil. Gated communities are more often located in urban environments but also exist in rural areas (secondary residences). In urban settings, they are found in suburbs as well as in central cities and even inner cities, and in more recent and older neighborhoods. They may include single-family or semidetached homes, apartment buildings, or even residential towers (although many specialists clearly distinguish between gated communities and condominium towers). Their size may range from several dozen to several thousand homes. Their residents generally come from the middle or upper classes, but gated communities inhabited by low-income households also exist. Many retirement communities are adopting the model of the gated community, particularly in the United States.

The opinions on gated communities vary considerably. There are numerous debates on their impacts, more often seen as negative than positive, on local taxation and economies, on social cohesion, and on service provision, and the offer of local collective amenities. Initial analyses of the phenomenon in the 1990s mainly saw gated communities as a source of social segregation on the basis of income especially, because of their capacity to target particular clienteles due to the cost of the housing, the specialized offer of services and amenities, their internal regulations, and the high residents’ fees. The analyses also raised the notion of urban secession to describe this new residential form, not only because of the phenomena of enclosure and microgovernance that underlie it but also due to quite vigorous struggles on the part of residents of gated communities, especially in the United States, to obtain local tax reductions.

Supporters of privatization say that gated communities are more efficient in their offer of collective goods and services, which may differ in each gated community, so that households can choose and pay for only those services and amenities that [Page 1182]they are likely to use. Some see gated communities as a way of re-creating neighborhood communities in increasingly diversified (and, in some cases, polarized) urban environments characterized by high residential mobility. This view is, however, contested due to the very constraining regulations found in some gated communities and the tendency for residents to launch legal proceedings when disputes arise, which have nothing in common with the modes of conflict resolution regarding lifestyles and the residential environment found in communities in the sociological sense of the term.

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