ABSTRACT
Gated private neighbourhoods first took root on the Iberian peninsula in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some earlier Spanish exceptions dating to the 1950s. In Spain and Portugal this specific socio-spatial form, whose origins can be traced back to the beginning of modernity, seems to be merely a late 20th-century novelty and an import, even if one whose paths are not particularly easy to determine. Gated neighbourhoods, in their modern form, began within the Anglo-American world, resurging in the United States in great numbers in or around the late 1960s. They have now spread worldwide proving to have, in many countries and regions, a range of affinities with what has been termed postmodern society, space and urbanism. Gated communities, in their earlier forms, arose in a transitional, recent modern, bourgeois and liberal capitalist AngloAmerican social-spatial setting. Two different but sequentially and socially connected residential forms appear to make up this first version: the enclosed and gated version of the mid-18th century British residential square, and the planned mid-19th-century AngloAmerican romantic suburb (Raposo 2002, 2003). Later instances of this phenomenon or its contemporary form are much more extensive and can be found in a greater and more diverse world, including Spain and Portugal.
