Gated Community

A gated community is a portion of public space that has, through the construction of physical walls or any other barrier, become separated out and privately controlled. Initially described by Richard Sennett in 1970 as purified communities, these enclosures subsequently have been classified by Edward Blakely and Mary Snyder in accordance with their function. Lifestyle communities refer to developments that create enclaves with all the amenities of the city being placed within predominantly residential land use enclosures outside of cities. The second category of gated communities refers to high-cost residential developments that are affordable only to a particular elite. The third category of gated communities is referred to as the security zone community, where enclosure is fitted to existing roads and infrastructure to create a controllable space. As the private–public separation of space has become increasingly blurred, these different categories of gated communities have become less distinguishable.

Gated communities frequently are sold as a panacea to the social ills of the city. Developers often play on fears in their marketing of gated communities. In particular, gated communities are a response to fear of crime and are characterized by the core features of surveillance and security. Other features may include environmental design interventions such as lighting and panoptic devices. The symbolic functioning of gated communities is summarized in Newman's discussion of defensible space. Newman's suggestions for safer environmental design include an enhanced sense of territoriality and the increased potential for surveillance of public space. Gated communities are highly contested. On one side of the issue is a set of urban residents who feel increasingly compelled to secure themselves against real and imagined burgeoning crime. On the other side is a series of human rights issues around the exclusion of marginalized urban citizens. In his seminal work “Fortress Los Angeles,” Mike Davis led a series of critiques of gated communities. For these authors, gated communities are less about controlling violent crime (to which poorer communities are more vulnerable) and more about controlling the types of people who have access to or can be included in communities. Gated communities attract homogeneous groups of people and promote insularity. With their barriers and buffers and their security, surveillance, and control, gated communities represent an emergent urban spatial apartheid. Through these enclosures, the city becomes increasingly hostile to marginalized people, who become increasingly demonized because there is so little public interaction. The constant watch of private security services also skews the implementation of public security to the broader urban community and creates a false sense of security. Gated communities are not found only in First World cities; a number of authors have commented on the emergence of gated communities as a means of ensuring the safety of a privileged elite in sanitized spaces divorced from the pervasive poverty of Third World cities. Much of this work has been centered on the cities of São Paulo in Brazil and Johannesburg in South Africa, where gated communities have represented the strengthening of urban segregation.