Gated communities are a common sight, but they are detrimental to communities and exacerbate inequity in cities. From automatic gates and tall, green, metal fences to rough concrete walls topped with shattered glass, gated communities appear under different names and guises in cities all over the world. They are everywhere and have been for some time.
In general, gated communities can be defined as residential developments that privatise otherwise public space, control access and have designated perimeters (Blakely and Synder, 1997). It is interesting as this definition creates somewhat of a misnomer: a gated community need not be “gated” nor be a “community” (Roitman, 2010). This piece will explore them in detail, beginning with concrete facts and analysis as to why we are here, then probing the effects of our current situation and finally extrapolating toward future improvements.
3 Causes
Before considering the consequences of gated communities, we must understand how this urban phenomenon occurs endemically around the world, independent of culture and geography. There are three main drivers:
- The aspirations of the middle class. Summarised effectively as the “American dream” of the 1950s where hardworking families with growing wealth sought large homes in idyllic neighbourhoods. Gated communities represented an apotheosis of this dream, everything middle society wanted in one convenient package – leaving the chaos outside (Cabrales, Barajas and Canosa Zamora, 2001). This complex social trend has fallen away in many developed countries, but is in fact highly prevalent in the developing world. It is tied to self-worth, proving oneself and encouraging others to respect you with shows of material wealth.
- Security from crime and harassment. Common drawcards of gated communities (especially in dangerous or developing cities) is the existence of guards, fences and armed gates to stop crime. Protection of home, family and possessions is an intuitive driver for households to pay premium to join these housing arrangements (Blakely and Snyder, 1997). The protection of financial property value is another noted reason for joining gated communities, but this is nuanced with the cyclical nature of supply and demand in this specific niche of the property market.
- Exclusive access to amenities. They are cheaper way to access luxuries like swimming pools, spas, parks, sports facilities and even restaurants – economically, the costs and risks of owning and maintaining these amenities are spread across a group of households. A single household may not be able to afford them all, while a government institution certainly cannot provide them for an entire neighbourhood. Thus the gated communities arises as a medium for wealthier households.
3 Problems:
Now that we have covered the broad reasons for the appearance of gated communities, it follows that we should consider their main consequences. Urban works tend to be considered under various dimensions: political, economic, environmental…but these aspects are largely quite balanced on their evaluation of gated communities. For example, it is commonly regarded that while gated communities often negotiate exemptions from land taxes and council rates, their “club-style” economic system is a more effective way for the wealthy to obtain large recreational goods. Similarly, an accountable management system toward maintaining house prices naturally encourages better consideration of the local natural ecosystem, but then again, it is argued that their popularity induces urban sprawl and inefficient use of limited space.
Rather, the notoriety, or perhaps infamy, of gated communities often stems from the torrent of social distaste and distrust for them. Here, let us attempt to unwind the furore of this topic, and highlight the three core social consequences of an over-prevalence of gated communities:
- They are not safer. Namely, they do not actually provide the qualities that people expect when joining them. Wilson-Doenges (2002) reports that while gated residents feel more personal safety, the level of crime has not changed compared to non-gated areas. It can be argued that in a gated community, security guards and fences are deterrents rather than absolute defence measures, but this is not justified when considering the cost, hindering access by emergency vehicles and in fact being a “target” to criminals.
- They encourage adversarial groupthink. Many studies (Pile et al, 1999; Low, 2003; Lang and Danielsen, 1997) indicate that gated communities foster oppositional behaviour and attitudes among neighbours, a kind of “us versus them” mentality. Visible exclusiveness intensifies resentment between the classes and breeds tension and distrust in the neighbourhood. This loss of citizenship, neighbourliness and lack of contact is well documented to result in poorer relationships and exaggerates prejudices. But it is even more intuitive that groups who so readily choose to put fences between themselves and their fellow city-dwellers will breed hostility between them.
- They fragment the built environment. Fences, gates and privately controlled areas, in general, are anathema to social urbanists in general. Restricting the flow of pedestrian traffic, and superimposing the wealth and lifestyle choice of people upon the aesthetic environment is a significant factor – one large mansion is a stand-out anomaly; a group of them is near ominous from the perspective of ‘outsiders’. Severing these social interactions that are otherwise so common in neighbourhoods in fact decreases safety, community health and neighbourly support networks. Sabatini and Caceres (2004) make an interesting point about the scale of segregation – all cities face socioeconomic and often racial segregation over suburbs and regions, but concentrating those differences on a small physical boundary like a gated community breeds confrontation.
These social consequences indicate the endemic issues gated communities cause in their local neighbourhoods and in the greater socio-political diaspora of their city. As urban sprawl increases and suburbia transforms with the population and lifestyles of the 21st century, it is imperative that stakeholders around the world act to mitigate the social backlashes that gated communities bring.
In the developed world it may seem that gated communities dying out: a baby-boomer-bred, suburban apotheosis that is simply becoming more irrelevant with younger generations. And while this is true of some cosmopolitan cities, it is certainly not true of all of them. Racial tensions, urban blight and fear of crime still allow these communities to remain entrenched in many places around the advanced world.
However, the issue is profoundly greater in the developing world. The three general causes of gated communities stated above are all clearly evident in the socioeconomic classes of India, China, Latin America, amongst many others. Therefore, preventing the adverse social impacts that gated communities create is paramount to urban design in the developing world.
3 Solutions:
In poorer cities, living in gated communities is not an example of Anglo-Saxon elitism, but rather quite literally, a manifestation of a better life for your family. This is an economic decision to gain safety and amenities, not a result of ill-will to the surrounding population.
As a result, policy makers use a concerted, multi-faceted strategy to ensure their people do not feel the need to join gated communities for better lives, and thus unknowingly entrench the inequality in their society. Here are some points on achieving this:
- Focus on fundamental human needs. Policy-makers and planners should consider human needs (a simple example is Maslow’s Pyramid), and understand that the socio-economics of their population will determine what needs they want satisfied. Developing cities want water, sanitation, garbage disposal and electricity. When the government cannot provide, the rich will remove themselves from society and formulate their own methods to achieve living standards – gated communities. Providing such infrastructure, even incrementally, can go a long way to alleviate needs to ‘escape’ the common urban domain. Similarly, in first-world cities, providing local sport and recreation facilities, local, rapid services like gardening and maintenance, and local restaurants and entertainment, they too may find the demand for gated communities shrinking.
- Access over ownership. The economic theory of the shared public good and the tragedy of the commons suggests that providing amenities like swimming pools, sports facilities, entertainment areas for free to the public are simply not financially or durably sustainable. But secluding them to a few owner-users need not be the solution either. Access over ownership is a growing part of the world economy, and people paying per use of amenities on an ad hoc basis can satisfy the wants of much of the community. This is not a new concept: local swimming pools, tennis courts etc have been doing it for decades. Rather it is the amount, accessibility and diversity of these facilities that needs to be improved, meaning people will not have to resort to private consortiums.
- House affordability and adequate zoning. This is potentially the most demanding and controversial of the three suggestions considered here. Residential property prices incorporate an incredibly vast range of market factors and are thus highly complex to manage. Taxation changes, restrictions on investment properties, foreign ownership and other things are ways that governments can manipulate the housing market for the benefit of the populace. Zoning by comparison is more direct in impact, but is very difficult to execute again due to lobbying. Perhaps inequality between suburbs and areas of a city is always going to exist. After all, we are talking about fundamental human nature in cultural grouping and elitism, a part (albeit a darker part) of who we are. But we can mitigate this impact and division on local communities that gated communities and segregated housing creates.
These solutions are by no means exhaustive, but they are broad and relevant to modern cities.
The gated community, while severely dissected in this piece, is perhaps a metaphor for larger forces affecting our cities. As our habitats become more diverse in culture, race, gender and beliefs, as economic inequality continues to grow, our cities are becoming increasingly divided (physically and socially). Borders change, economies transform, trade, tourism and politics all ebb and flow, but cities are stalwart, built, immovable. They are a constant in a fresh and ever-changing world, and thus it is critical that those within them unite in citizenship and neighbourliness. Gated communities are but a microcosm of these forces, but understanding them and their risks to our communities is a key step in improving our urban life.
References:
Blakely EJ and Snyder MG (1997). Fortress America. Gated Communities in the United States. Brookings Institution Press/Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Washington, DC/ Cambridge, MA
Cabrales Barajas LF and Canosa Zamora E (2001) Segregacio´n residencial y fragmentacio´n urbana: los fraccionamientos cerrados en Guadalajara. Espiral VII(20): 223–253.
Lang RE and Danielsen KA (1997) Gated communities in America: walling out the world? Housing Policy Debate 8(4): 867–877.
Low S (2003) Behind the Gates. Routledge, New York.
Pile S, Brook C and Mooney G (1999) Introduction. In Unruly Cities? Order/Disorder (Pile S et al. (eds)). Open University/ Routledge, London, pp. 1–6.
Sabatini F and Ca´ceres G (2004) Los barrios cerrados y la ruptura del patro´n tradicional de segregacio´n en las ciudades latinoamericanas: el caso de Santiago de Chile. In Barrios Cerrados en Santiago de Chile: Entre la Exclusio´n y la Integracio´n Residencial (Ca´ceres G and Sabatini F (eds)). Pontificia Universidad Cato´lica de Chile-Instituto de Geografı´a and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Santiago de Chile, pp. 9–43.
Wilson-Doenges G (2000) An exploration of sense of community and fear of crime in gated communities. Environment and Behavior 32(5): 597–611.