ABSTRACT
Gated communities gating decisively demarcates and separates out a residential enclave from its surroundings. This chapter attempts to understand Occupy as a response to, and continuation of, the renewed salience and revitalized practice of various forms of gating and enclosure. It explores the origins of Occupy and the author's argument related to the kind of evolving urban praxis. The chapter deals with a sketch, a striking and certainly far-from-typical sample of imagery from the contemporary urban landscape. If there is one development of the late twentieth century that contributes to the impression of geopolitical change, and signals a novel enthusiasm for redrawing and reinforcing urban boundaries, it is the international proliferation of so-called gated communities. Finally, the chapter makes sense of the contemporary urban environment in general, and the Occupy movement in particular, as expressions of a new, globalizing geopolitics.
