ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how gated communities, as a private means of provision of public infrastructure, produce increased segregation at the local scale. It discusses the ways local governments usually favour the development of this form of land use to pay for the cost of urban sprawl, while indeed producing social diseconomies for the whole metropolitan area. The chapter provides to analyse the pre-emptive protection of the neighbourhood as being detrimental to the neighbours of a gated community and the adjacent urban communities. It deals with a special interest in the impact on social patterns. The chapter analyses the sprawl of gated communities in southern California, and evaluates its social impact. It presents a method to evaluate the level of socio-economic differentiation occurring where gated communities. The social sciences literature about gated communities has been highly publicised, and three types of arguments are part of a general theoretical discourse, which especially focuses on relationship between gated communities and social segregation.
