Here’s a riddle: what do you get when you have a cluster of exclusive expensive houses next to a poor neighbourhood and you build a fence to protect the expensive houses from the poor? You get a gated community. Another riddle: What do you get when you have a cluster of exclusive expensive houses next to an upper-class neighbourhood and you build a fence to secure the expensive houses? You get a gated community. Two gated communities in two different contexts. Maybe the answers to the riddles are a bit more complex.
A gated community in the sense of providing protection to those within its walls has been around since we could build vertical structures to keep out perceived threats to our security be it of the human or animal variety. We erect walls to keep out the “other” — sometimes independent of evidence the threat to our security is real.
In economically polarized cities this spatial arrangement has become an acceptable norm (for those behind the walls). It’s a logical mechanism for providing human security to the walled when mechanisms are in place to ensure that those behind the walls will always be behind the walls and those outside of the walls will never move inside. But the societal perils of economic polarity I’ll leave to another time.
So what about the “other” when economic polarity isn’t so gross? Recent research by professor Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges in the journal Environment & Behavior reveals there is “no significant difference in actual crime rate” between a gated community and its un-gated neighbour. The security argument for a gated community is dispensed with by research but the perception that there is security behind the walls persists.
What are some of the outcomes of this perceived fear? Those living in gated communities report a lower sense of community. They also perpetuate a society summed up by geographer Steven Flusty’s quip “you are what you pay for” — a gated community maintains and perpetuates exclusion. You spatially arrange a psychological social and economic condition and thus perpetuate it. The proliferation of gatedness produces and maintains an assemblage of fearing the “other.”
By accommodating the “secession of the successful” to once again quote Flusty gates are good at protecting the symbolism of economic privilege. The gated community an island of prestige is a symbolic defense of status rather than physical protection for its occupants. The gated residents bunker down in fear of slightly lower housing prices.
To normalize gated communities — to accept exclusion by the successful — is to physically and socially subordinate the surrounding communities. Rather than protecting against a perceived sense of security against crime you create exclusion — not from criminals but from fellow citizens. The ultimate outcome of gating could prove to be what Flusty calls a “sugar-coated global caste society.” You are the security access card that opens the gate you paid for.
Such communities he continues are “intended as high-end marketable commodities saleable prepackaged landscapes engineered to satisfy the lifestyle preference of the affluent. This tendency is made clear by [professor] Neil Smith’s assessment of how urban expansionism is powered by two industries: the real-estate developers who package and define value and the manufacturers of culture who define taste and consumption preferences.”
When such packaging is designed to geographically say “I’m better than you” allowing some to sit on their island of privilege perpetuating empirically false fears and when these areas are serviced with a system of public roads and public waste collection and public goods and services it critiques the very foundation of a city the notion of providing public services at all. Maybe Margaret Thatcher was right. Maybe there isn’t society. Maybe there is only man and woman and family.
Good luck.
Steven Snell is a professional city planner with a master’s in urban planning. His columns focus on spatial justice and the city. The opinions expressed are his own. Follow him on Twitter @stevenpsnell.
