ancient cities

290 Gated Community
A gated community in a suburb of Los Angeles.
Source: Steven K. Martin.
an American export but also a response to local
specificities (e.g., high crime and inequality in South
Africa and Brazil), and they exist in regions and
countries with diverse cultures and urban histories
such as the Arab world, Australia, the Caribbean,
Eastern and Western Europe, China, New Zealand,
Russia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.
This explosion in the number of gated communities
worldwide is matched by the growth in literature
explaining and analyzing them. Edward J. Blakely
and Mary Gail Snyder’s book Fortress America is
widely considered the classic text, charting the
modern rise of gated communities in the United
States, which brought the issue of gated communities
to the forefront of academic and policy agendas in
the late 1990s. Building on this work, anthropologists
Setha Low and Teresa Caldeira, focusing on
America and Brazil respectively, have more recently
explored the reality of life “inside the gates,” as well
as the implications for those excluded.
The global spread of gated communities is partly
driven by the construction and security industries,
promoting a public discourse of fear related to the
risks of urban life, which they allege can be ameliorated
through the secure environment of a gated
community. In addition, such communities are
often promoted by local municipalities eager to
attract high-rate taxpayers, particularly those who
consume so few public services. Residents of gated
communities themselves explain their decision to
move to a gated community as predominantly
couched in the desire for increased security that, in
the context of neoliberal state withdrawal, is not
reliant on a government or its associated public
security enforcement, often perceived as ineffective
(and in some contexts, corrupt). This desire for
security is not an exclusively physical need for protection
from crime but is equally financial, as gated
communities offer a secure investment that is lifestyle
based. For example, residents describe their
way of life in a gated community in terms of a rural
idyll—harking back to a bygone era in which children
could play outside and doors were left
unlocked—a lifestyle no longer possible in the contemporary
metropolis but one that can be successfully
re-created inside a gated community, albeit