Gated Community

Definition

The gated community is the fortified residential enclosure at the heart of the postmetropolis's Carceral Archipelago. Blakely and Snyder's canonical definition (quoted in Soja 2000, p. 317): "Gated communities are residential areas with restricted access in which normally public spaces are privatized. They are security developments with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and controlled entrances that are intended to prevent penetration by nonresidents… found from the inner cities to the exurbs and from the richest neighborhoods to the poorest." Their typology: Lifestyle Communities (retirement, golf and leisure, the suburban new town), Prestige Communities (preserves for "the 'fortunate fifth'"), and Security Zone Communities (built on fear of crime, in city, suburban, and "barricade" perches — the last concentrated in the poorest areas). At least 20,000 existed by 1997, housing over 3 million households; California, Florida, and Texas lead, with Southern California holding "the densest concentrations" — the Palos Verdes peninsula (whole gated municipalities), coastal Orange County (Leisure World), and the west San Fernando Valley (Hidden Hills, "where white picket fences are mandatory").

Soja embeds the gated community in its juridical family: the common interest development (CID) — contractual covenants binding residents' rights and obligations, sometimes "themed" around a chosen image, and known to some lawyers as "association-administered servitude regimes" (p. 316); the homeowner's association (HOA) and the ~200,000 residential community associations (RCAs); and their explosive growth from ~1,000 CIDs in the early 1960s to over 80,000 by the mid-1980s, "probably… the principal form of new home ownership" in most metropolitan areas. Mike Davis's Homegrown Revolution supplies the political genealogy (subchapter titles: "Sunbelt Bolshevism," "The White Wall," "Suburban Separatism," "Nimbys and Know-Nothings") — the homeowners' movement as "a protest against the urbanization of suburbia" and "the reassertion of social privilege." MacKenzie's Privatopia supplies the governance thesis: CID housing "constitutes and facilitates privatization of the land planning function itself" (p. 318); Reich's "secession of the successful" and Murray's "caste society" mark its political ends; and Soja's corrective records the counter-tendencies — Route 2's progressive limited-equity cooperative, and the poorer communities' new "microgovernance" around environmental justice and place-making.

Key Thinkers

• Edward Blakely & Mary Gail Snyder (referenced, not paged — see log) — Fortress America (1997): the definition, the typology, the national census.
• Evan MacKenzie (referenced, not paged — see log) — Privatopia (1994): HOAs as "residential private government"; the public/private blurring.
• Mike Davis (referenced, not paged — see log) — "Homegrown Revolution": Sunbelt Bolshevism, the White Wall, Suburban Separatism, "Nimbys and Know-Nothings"; homeowners as Marx's "sack of potatoes."
• Dennis R. Judd (referenced, not paged — see log) — "The Rise of the New Walled Cities": the mall and the CID as enclosure.
• Edward W. Soja — the synthesis and the corrective: servitude regimes, the microgovernance inventory, the progressive exceptions.
• Mark Purcell (referenced, not paged — see log) — HOAs, the tax revolt, and Valley secession in the San Fernando Valley.

Related Concepts

• carceral-archipelago — the archipelago's residential islands.
• suburban-governance — the private-government apparatus the CID/HOA regime names.
• interdictory-space — the Luxury Laager and its perimeter devices.
• neighbourhood-character — the covenant-manufactured identity the gated community sells (Dovey's "instant place identity").
• home-ownership-democracy — the political settlement gated enclaves privatize.
• privatised-public-space — the "normally public spaces" the gates privatize.
• ecology-of-fear — the fear-economy the gates answer and amplify.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — "Homegrown Revolution" (pp. 312–319): the Island-at-Westlake-Village case (pp. 313–314), the CID/HOA/RCA taxonomy and the "servitude regime" phrase (pp. 315–317), Blakely & Snyder's definition and types (p. 317), MacKenzie's Privatopia and the Reich/Murray futures (pp. 317–319), and the post-1992 progressive counter-movements (pp. 320–322).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• MacKenzie: "the words public and private… are used in popular and political discourse as if they were – but they are not" (quoted p. 320) — does the gated community expose the public/private binary itself as the problem, as Soja argues?
• Blakely & Snyder's Security Zone "barricade perches" are concentrated in the poorest areas — the gated community is not only a luxury form; does the wiki's suburban-governance register capture its inverted, poor-perch variant?
• Davis reads the Homegrown Revolution as "sunbelt bolshevism" (homeowners' Soviets); Soja finds in the same "little tactics of the habitat" a grassroots spatial consciousness among poorer communities — is micro-governance inherently reactionary, or is it a capacity that coalitions can redirect?