Behind the Gates: The consequences of secured residential communities in the urban and suburban United States

 

Setha Low - City University of New York  

 

Abstract: Across America lower-middle, middle and upper-middle-class gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and residential segregation, exacerbating social cleavages that already exist. While historically secured and gated communities were built in the United States to protect family estates and to contain the leisure world of retirees, these urban and suburban developments now target a much broader market, including families with children. This retreat to secured enclaves with walls, gates and guards, materially and symbolically contradicts aspects of an idealized American ethos and values, threatens democratic spatial practices such as public access to open space, and creates yet another barrier to social interaction, building of social networks, as well as tolerance of diverse cultural, racial, and social groups in a period marked by Homeland Security.

My ethnographic research queries the dramatic increase in the numbers of Americans moving to secured residential enclaves–16 million people or about 6% of all households–and invites a more complex account of their motives and values. Gated communities now include high rise apartment complexes for working and lower middle class whites, as well as Latinos and Asian immigrant groups, townhouses and garden apartments for the middle-class, retrofitted housing projects for the urban poor, as well as single family enclaves for the upper-middle class. Based on ten years of ethnographic research in seven gated communities in New York, Texas, and Mexico I found that people move for safety, security, niceness, and community–they talk about a fear of crime and other people, and echo a deep seated sense of insecurity about the world and their everyday life. These issues are not new, but it is the American dream with a twist because residents’ security is gained by architecturally excluding others and providing for services privately, not publically. Further, an intensified politics of fear is emerging that justifies gating as well as private governance, increased social controls, and surveillance to reinforce these socio-spatial and class based exclusionary practices. This architecture and the accompanying politics threatens the viability of public spaces through increasing enclosure and separation of people in a rapidly globalizing world.

 

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