ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s a discourse has been steadily growing about a pattern of urban living that many thought to have been consigned to history: the so-called gated communities or privately governed urban territory. Their rise was initially fastest in the US and Latin America, where the media and academic commentators were quick to describe the phenomenon in terms of security-oriented privatized urbanism. A popular critique easily followed, warning of the social fragmentation of the city; out-of control urban segregation; secession; and the end of civic order as we know it. Gated communities became for some, both symbols and symptoms of a line that is being crossed from voice-based citizenship to exit-based citizenship; from politically-organized to market-organized civic society. While the discourse on gated urbanism seemed to spread from American sources, the phenomenon itself, had its own local history in every continent and country (Caldeira 2000, Carvalho et al. 1997, Thuillier 2005): in China (Giroir 2006, Webster et al. 2006), South-east Asia and Australia (Burke 2001), Europe (Glasze 2003, Billard et al. 2005), Eastern Europe (Lentz 2006), South Africa (Jürgens and Landman 2006) and the Arab world (Glasze 2000, Glasze and Alkhayyal 2002). Gating may thus be interpreted as a global trend. It is undoubtedly influenced in many ways by US models but it is developed according to local political, legal and architectural traditions (Glasze et al. 2002, Glasze 2005).
