Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

116 PLANET OF SLUMS
Bangalore, of course, is famous for re-creating Palo Alto and
Sunnyvale lifestyles, complete with Starbucks and multiplexes, in its
southern suburbs. According to planner Solomon Benjamin, the
wealthy expats (officially "non-resident Indians") live as they might in
California in "exclusive 'farmhouse' clusters and apartment blocks with
their own swimming pools and health clubs, walled-in private security,
24-hour electrical power backup and exclusive club facilities."73 Lippo
Karawaci in the Tangerang district, west of Jakarta, doesn't have an
American name but is otherwise also a copy of a West Coast suburb,
boasting a more or less self-sufficient infrastructure with hospital,
shopping mall, cinemas, sport and golf club, restaurants and a university.
It also contains internally gated areas known locally as "totally
protected zones."74
The quests for security and social insulation are obsessive and
universaL In both central and suburban districts of Manila, wealthy
homeowners' associations barricade public streets and crusade for slum
demolition. Erhard Berner describes the exclusive Loyola Heights
district:
An elaborate system of iron gates, roadblocks and checkpoints demar­
cates the boundaries of the area and cuts it off from the rest of the city,
at least at nighttime. The threats to life, limb, and property are the over­
whelming common concern of the wealthy residents. Houses are turned
into virtual fortresses by surrounding them with high walls topped by
glass shards, barbed wire, and heavy iron bars on all windows.75
This "architecture of fear," as Tunde Agbola describes fortified
lifestyles in Lagos, is commonplace in the Third World and some parts
of the First, but it reaches a global extreme in large urban societies with
the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil,
Venezuela, and the United States.76 In Johannesburg, even before the
73 Solomon Benjamin, "Governance, Economic Settings and Poverty in
Bangalore," Environment and Urbanization 12:1 (April 2000), p. 39.
74 Harald Leisch, "Gated Communities in Indonesia," Cities 19:5 (2002), pp. 341,
344-45.
75 Berner, Defending a Place, p. 163.
76 For a description of Lagos's fortress homes, see Agbola, Arcbitecture of Fear,
pp. 68-69.
HAUSSMANN IN THE TROPICS 117
election of Nelson Mandela, big downtown businesses and affluent
white residents fled the urban core for northern suburbs (Sandton,
Randburg, Rosebank, and so on) which were transformed into highsecurity
analogues of American "edge cities." Within these sprawling
suburban laagers with their ubiquitous gates, housing clusters, and barricaded
public streets, anthropologist Andre Czegledy finds that
security has become a culture of the absurd.
The high perimeter walls are often topped by metal spikes, razor wire,
and more recently, electrified wiring connected to emergency alarms. In
conjunction with portable "panic button" devices, the house alarms are
electronically connected to "armed response" security companies. The
surreal nature of such implicit violence was highlighted in my mind one
day when walking with a colleague in Westdene, one of the more middle­
class neighborhoods of the Northern suburbs. On the streets was
parked a minivan from a local security company that boasted in large
letters on the vehicle's side panel that they respond with "firearms and
explosives." Explosives?77
However, in Somerset West, Cape Town's tony suburban belt, the post­
Apartheid fortress house is being replaced by more innocent homes
without elaborate security hardware. The secret of these gentle residences
is the state-of-the-art electric fence surrounding the entire
subdivision or, as they are locally known, "security village." Tenthousand-volt
fences, originally developed to keep lions away from
livestock, deliver a huge, pulsating shock that is supposed to disable,
without actually killing, any intruder. With burgeoning global demand
for such residential security technologies, South Africa's electric fencing
firms hope to exploit the export market for suburban security.78
Brazil's most famous walled and Americanized edge city is
Alphaville, in the northwest quadrant of greater Sao Paulo. Named
(perversely) after the dark new world in Godard's dystopian 1965 [lim ,
77 Andre Czegledy, "Villas of the Highveld: A Cultural Perspective on
Johannesburg and Its Northern Suburbs," in Richard Tomlinson et al. (eds), Emerging
Jobannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartbeid City, New York 2003, p. 36.
78 Murray Williams, "Gated Villages Catch on among City'S Super-Rich," Cape
Argus (Cape Town), 6 January 2004. For details on suburban electric fence technology,
see www .electerrific.co.za.