ancient cities

eliant on walls and private security. In other
words, families can remain in proximity to the services
of the city (such as good schools, shopping
centers, and employment opportunities) but detach
themselves from its less desirable realities such as
crime and general insecurity, without moving to a
rural backwater. It is therefore ironic that Teresa
Caldeira’s “insider/outsider” discourse based on
research in São Paulo found that residence in a
gated community actually serves to increase fear of
crime among those inside the gates, as the dual
effects of everyday “talk of crime,” in which insecurity
“beyond the gate” is magnified, combines
with insular movement patterns to produce amplified
panic and fear related to life outside. Despite
broad recognition that residents favor gated communities
to meet household desires for privatized
physical, financial, and lifestyle security, it is important
to stress the absence of a singular or uniform
experience of gating throughout the world.
Implications for the City and Society
Although gated communities are eulogized by
residents, developers, and real estate agents for
providing safe family spaces and secure financial
investments, they have received a largely negative
press from academics and the media, who perceive
them as private fortresses that destroy the
vibrancy of the city through their exclusivity. A
minority of researchers endorse gated communities,
highlighting their role in protecting threatened
groups from ethnic conflict, providing
employment and services for nearby poor communities,
demonstrating economic efficiency in
service provision, and ensuring the retention of
financial capital in weak states. In the main, however,
gated communities are understood as problematic
urban domains.
To summarize the argument: Although moving
to a gated community can be a rational individual
decision, especially in the context of severe violent
crime and weak state capacity, the collective
consequences for the rest of society and the city
are considered destructive. Two major negative
outcomes are stressed in the literature: the exclusion
of individuals and the fragmentation of the
city. Although middle- and low-income gated communities
exist in some contexts (notably the United
States), most gated communities (in the United
States and elsewhere) are populated by high-income
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residents and thus effectively incarcerate the wealthy
in highly exclusive spaces. Because these spaces are
consequently accessible only to the minority with
financial means, spaces (which often were previously
public) become privatized, thus restricting
freedom of movement in the city and deepening
social polarization by excluding the unknown mass
of “others” or “them” from “our” safe spaces. As
gated community residents tend to be socioeconomically
similar (a consequence of house prices
and restrictive covenants), often functioning with
limited interaction outside their walls, spatial separation
is inevitably entangled with social exclusion.
In addition, gated communities are criticized for
physically fragmenting the city into a series of elite
private citadels that ultimately lead to an urban
future of increased exclusion and segregation. This
imminent urban dystopia is visualized as a series of
secure forts, in which the wealthy maneuver from
private space to private space, functioning without
physical, social, or civic engagement with the dangerous
outside world, which is populated by the
excluded factions of society. Less exaggerated
accounts of this spatial distortion emphasize the
influence of gated communities on disrupting traffic
flows and their inevitable role in displacing
crime into nongated zones.
A further implication, which receives less direct
attention in the literature, is the political withdrawal
of gated community residents. Gated communities
represent an extreme form of citizen retreat in the
global era of neoliberal state withdrawal. In this
context, the private sector has emerged as the
dominant service provider, alongside the growing
privatization of space in contemporary cities.
Gated community residents demonstrate an augmented
version of this trend because they are in
some cases wholly dependent on private services
and governance, and thus their reliance on the
state is further depleted, and consequently, they
exhibit reduced willingness to submit to the state
in other aspects of everyday life. Thus, at a larger
scale, gated communities contribute to challenging
the very basis of modern society, that of the state
as sovereign.
Indeed, research in South Africa indicates that
preference for living in a gated community is not
solely a residential or security-based decision; it
also reflects a desire to disconnect from civic
engagement and abstain from the responsibilities
of civil society. In other words, gating is about