Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States

Abstract

1 "Civic space is more than a political and jurisdictional construct. It is a manifestation of society, culture, and the shared polity." 1 "... the growing number of methods used to control the physical environment for physical and economic security." 2 "They are, however, more than walled-off areas and refuges from urban violence and a rapidly changing society. They are also a search for sociospatial community - the ideal community that Americans have sought since the landing of the Pilgrims" 2 "Gated communities are residential areas with restricted acess in which normally public spaces are privatized. They are security developments with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and controlled entrancesthat are intended to prevent penetration by nonresidents. 3 "In 1985 gated communities existed only in a handful of places. Today they can be found in every major metropolitan area. These developments in part reflect the notion of community as an island, a social bulwark against the general degradation of the urban social order; they also reflect the attempt to substitute private controls for public organization, for the joint responsiblities of democratic citizenship all of us share." 3 "Gated communities manifest a number of tensions: between exclusionary aspirations rooted in fear and protection of privilege and the values of civic responsibility, between the trend toward privatization of public services and the ideals of the public good and general welfare, and between the need für personal and community control of the environment and the dangers of making outsiders fellow citizens." 3 "Gated and walled cities are as old as city-building itself." 4 "Upper-income gated developments like New York's Tuxedo Park and the private streets of St. Louis were built in the late 1800 by wealthy citizens to insulate themselves from the troublesome aspect of rapidly industrializing cities (...) during the twentieth century more gated, fenced compounds were built by members of the East Coast and Hollywood aristricracies (...) they were uncommon places for uncommon people." 4 GC remained rarities untiel the advent of the master planned retirement developments of the late 1960s and 1970 (...) like Leisure world (...) Gates soon spread to resorts and country club developments, and then to middle-class suburban subdivisions. 5 Since the late 1980s, gates have become ubiquitous in many areas of the country; there are now entire incorporated cities that feauture guarded entrances. 5 [GC] (...) are most common in the Sunbelt states of the Southeast and Southwest (...) in absolute numbers, California and Florida are home to most gated communities, with Texas running a distant third. 5 "... they are primarily a phenomenon of metropolitan agglomerations, they are rare in largely rural states ..." 6 "Although early gated communities were restricted to retirement villages and compounds for the super rich, the majority of the newer settlements of the 1970s to 1990 are middle to upper-middle class. (...) We estimate that one third of the developments built with gates are luxury developments for the upper and upper-middle class, and perhaps another third are retirement oriented. 7 We estimate in 1997 that there are as many as 20.000 gated communities, with more than 3 million units. They are increasingly rapidly in number, in all regions and price classes. A leading national real estate developper estimates that eight out of every ten new urban projects are gated." 8 Economic and social segregation are not new. In fact, zoning and city planning were designed, in part, to preserve the position of the privileged with subtle variances in building and density codes. But GC go furhter (...) they create physical barriers to access. thea also privatize community space, not merely individual space. Many gated areas also privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and communal services such as street maintenance, recreation, and entertainment. The new developments can create a private world that need share little with ist neighbors or with the larger political system." 8 street design in suburbs 9 unconnected subdivisions, self focused, decline of public space, inwardly focused residential space 11 "Gated communities are part of the trend of suburbanization, and their roots lie in the same urban design tradition. The suburb is a distinctly American form, but ist roots can be traced to nineteenth-century England. The artificial village features we find in planned unit developments are vestiges of the development of English country homes in the industrial era. Emulating the landed country gentry, merchants and industrialists built small country estates in or on the fringe of remote villages that lay along the new paved highways developed during the reign of George III (...) over time, more rapid transportation opened country living to people with money, not merely thoses with landed wealth and inherited social position." 12 "Suburbs are not a recent innovation of market driven developers. They have a long utopioan history of famous designers and visionaries attempting to create the good life and the good society (...) has been city averse from ist beginning. 13 "The creators of the suburbs did everything they could to dissociate their development from the city. Names of developments were usually built around words like "park", "forest", "river", "hills", or "valley", mixed with "view", park" or "estates". 15 "gated communities have their antecedents in modern utopias, but they have been transformed in a totally new product, organized an marketed as a solution to contemporary problems rather than as a search for a better communal system (...) the logic of developers, for whom gated communities are a marketing device, another way to target specific submarkets, or, in some areas a necessitiy to meet demand (...) gates also provide the crucial product differentiation - and clear identity - 17 Preisvergleich gated/nongated 18 "The elderly have been targets of gated communities since the 1970s and gated second-home complexes are also well established. Now others are perceived as likely markets for gates, including empty nesters, who are likely to be away on long vacations frequently, and young double income families, in which no one is home during the day." 19 "Community cannot be achieved by physical design alone. Ebenezer Howard understood this well. In designing his influential Garden City in the nineteenth century, he focused on the system of governance as much as spatial form (...) Howard's ideas were adapted by Charles Stern Ascher, a Lawyer turned planner (...) in 1928 (...) he creatred (...) the modern homeowner association." 20 "The gated communities is the newest innovation in a long historical trend to ever more controlled, ever more privatized residential environments." 21 ...homeowner associations are not as communal or democratic as they might sound ..." 22 "Their rules (...) provide benefits beyond any protection of property values or asthetics. They ensure that neighbors need not deal with each other in even the smallest disputes if they prefer not to (...) avoiding social interaction (...) peopler are increasingly ceding older forms 24 "While at the national and states levels the public is asking for less government, at the local level people are creating more governance institutions. These numbers reflect the new privatization of residential government and the rise in business and commercial improvement districts ..." 24 "..previously public services ... private governments ..." 25 "... seceding from a city or county in order to avoid paying for those who don't live in one's HOA." 27 ""And althoug gates do not themselves cause inequality or other social problems, they do reflect and illustrate larger patterns and trends in society. 30 "The home is of central psychological value, and it represents most families' single largest investment, their most important source of financial security for the future." 31 "gated communities are part of the trend toward exercising physical and social means of territorial control." 31 In examining gated communities, we asked how community was affected: what people's expectations were of life behind gates, what experiences they had there, how they participated in neighborhood life, and how they related to the world outside. Did the presence of gates an a perimeter wall affect how residents felt about their neighborhoods, or the way they functioned? The shape and characteristics of the places we live in have great influence in our experiences, our social interactions, and our behavior." 31 ... Ferdinand Tönnies created the duality of "Gesellschaft" ["true community, natural, emotional, interdependent association among people]and "Gemeinschaft" [society, modern, rational and instrumental associations ..." 33 Tabelle: the elements of community 34 Neighborhood as community also includes a sense of mutual responsibility, significant interaction, and cooperative spirit. 34 "private aspect of community (...) feelings of belonging or connection to and identification with a place and its people ..." "The second facet of community is the "public" aspect. This is the community of mutual obligation, shared destiny or goals, direct democracy, and involvement in community affairs." 34 "In theory, HOASs would be an excellent vehicle for strong local communities ..." 34 Community] ... the most recent manifestation of the American urban form moves us away from the old power of place based on relationship to a new power of place based on property ownership. 36 Because gated communities are an emerging phenomenon and scholarly work on them is virtually nonexistant, we approached the research from an investigory standpoint. We drew from current sources as from newspapers and magazines; we also collected information from residents of gated communities, real estate developers, and public officials