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Introduction: International Perspectives on The New

Enclavism and the Rise of Gated Communities
Rowland Atkinson & Sarah Blandy
Published online: 22 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Rowland Atkinson & Sarah Blandy (2005) Introduction: International Perspectives on The New Enclavism
and the Rise of Gated Communities, Housing Studies, 20:2, 177-186, DOI: 10.1080/0267303042000331718

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 Housing Studies,
Vol. 20, No. 2, 177–186, March 2005

Introduction: International Perspectives

on The New Enclavism and the Rise of
Gated Communities
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ROWLAND ATKINSON & SARAH BLANDY

This volume gathers together substantially revised versions of papers first presented in
Glasgow, Scotland in September 2003. This event was an international meeting of
academics who discussed the significance, relative problems and benefits associated with
the international rise of gated communities. Gated communities (hereafter GCs) have been
defined in a number of ways. These definitions tend to cluster around housing development
that restricts public access, usually through the use of gates, booms, walls and fences.
These residential areas may also employ security staff or CCTV systems to monitor
access. In addition, GCs may include a variety of services such as shops or leisure
facilities. The growth of such private spaces has provoked passionate discussion about
why, where and how these developments have arisen. This volume presents an opportunity
to gather together contemporary and diverse views on what is at least commonly agreed to
be a radical urban form.
The apparently ‘unique’ characteristics of GCs present immediate problems for an
accurate definition. Should we include flats with door entry systems, tower blocks with
concierge schemes or partially walled housing estates, even detached houses with their
own gates? Among this confusion we suggest that the central feature of GCs is the social
and legal frameworks which form the constitutional conditions under which residents
subscribe to access and occupation of these developments, in combination with the
physical features which make them so conspicuous.
Living in a gated community means signing up to a legal framework which allows the
extraction of monies to help pay for maintenance of common-buildings, common services,
such as rubbish collection, and other revenue costs such as paying staff to clean or secure
the neighbourhood. However, such legal frameworks can also be found in many thousands
of non-gated homeowner associations in the US, and indeed in blocks of leasehold flats in
England. This leads us back to the important physical aspects of these developments.
Where a combination is found of these socio-legal agreements and a physical structure
which includes gates and walls enclosing space otherwise expected to be publicly
accessible, we can finally achieve some clarity of definition. Gated communities may

Correspondence Address: Rowland Atkinson, Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, 25 Bute
Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RS, UK. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0267-3037 Print/1466-1810 Online/05/02000177–10 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0267303042000331718
 178 R. Atkinson & S. Blandy

therefore be defined as walled or fenced housing developments, to which public access is

restricted, characterised by legal agreements which tie the residents to a common code of
conduct and (usually) collective responsibility for management.
While this definition may be useful it is often argued that gated communities express
more than a simple constellation of particular physical and socio-legal characteristics.
In the built environment around us we increasingly see examples of an attempt to boost
defensible space and the means to exclude the unwanted. This has meant that we can now
observe a continuum of ‘gating’ which can be seen moving between symbolic and more
concrete examples. Suburban areas with booms across private roads, housing estates with
‘buffer zones’ of grass and derelict land, and cul-de-sacs all express a mark of exclusion to
non-residents with varying degrees of efficacy. All of these built forms suggest a lack of
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‘permeability’ in the built environment directed at achieving increasingly privatised

lifestyles, predominantly through the pursuit of security. It is this attempt at self-imposed
exclusion from the wider neighbourhood, as well as the exclusion of others from the gated
community, which has driven a much wider debate about the relative merits of gating and
other strategies to achieve security, when set alongside other key concerns such as
freedom of access to the wider city, social inclusion and territorial justice.
These various issues form a core concern for analysts of gated communities—are they
really just a different type of housing or are they an extension of a rationale attempting to
create control, predictability and personal safety which may have external and negative
secondary impacts? Should gated communities be condemned or their example extended,
as the current Home Secretary has recommended. Regardless of these various questions it
is clear that gated communities have already divided many observers, critically over
whether ability to pay for security and privacy should allow such voluntary social
exclusion and access to these bubbles of safety. Indeed, the need for GCs may be
challenged in the context of the UK where prevailing crime rates may not seem to warrant
fortress-style enclaves. As we will see, these questions are by no means easy to address,
either for academics or policy-makers seeking socially equitable development.

The Fortified Neighbourhood

It is now well documented that gated communities can be seen as a response to the fear of
crime (Atkinson et al., 2004) but other drivers also appear significant. In particular the
desire for status, privacy and the investment potential of gated dwellings all form
important aspects of the motivation to live behind gates. For many housing researchers
drawn to new social problems and forms, gated communities appear a profoundly
interesting and relatively new object of study in the European context. The privatisation of
public spaces, fortification of urban and residential space and the embodiment of public
fears about private crimes (both property and personal) that gated communities invoke
provide rich ground for urban and housing researchers.
While commentators in Latin America, the US and South Africa have witnessed a
massive upswing in gated development for some time, their impacts and costs have only
begun to be speculated upon in the European context. In the British context little has been
written on gated communities, though this is changing (Webster, 2001). Recent
consideration of the value of gated communities in the UK has been challenged by
planners who view them as exclusive, unnecessary and burdensome due to the restrictions
on movement that they promote (Minton, 2002). A recent study suggests that there are now
 Introduction 179

more than 1000 gated communities in England alone (Atkinson et al., 2004). While this
may be numerically insignificant, the wider symbolic character of such development at a
time when the government is committed to pursuing styles of development which allow
permeability, affordable housing and diverse housing tenures appears problematic. There
seems much to learn from an international perspective on such issues.
Outside the European context gated communities have had a much longer genesis; as a
built form, gated enclaves were common in many areas of the world. In America they
remained a relative rarity until large master-planned communities arrived in the 1960s
(Blakely & Snyder, 1999; McKenzie, 1994). Many have argued that GCs represent a
search for community with residents seeking contact with like-minded people who
socially mirror their own aspirations. While advertising by developers (primarily in
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America) draws on this communitarian ideology it has been clear to some that the idea of a
gated ‘community’ is something of an oxymoron. Increasing numbers of recorded
neighbour disputes and conflict between residents and their management companies
suggest at least as many problems as are found in ‘normal’ developments (see for example,
Linford, 2001). An American survey carried out in 1987 found that 41 per cent of
associations suffered from major problems with rule violations (Barton & Silverman,
1987). In this volume Evan McKenzie picks up on this theme and argues that gated
communities increasingly contain residents openly hostile to the strictures to which they
have signed up, or faced with potentially massive problems of affordability due to large
repair bills for common roads or facilities. The possibility that GCs contain some kind of
built-in obsolescence may become increasingly apparent.

The Inter-Neighbourhood Contract: Place, Social Justice and the Pursuit of

Privatism
A key driver of interest in GCs stems from the sense that they form an intellectual
intersection at which we can locate a much wider range of social changes and concerns
relating to our urban context. The existing research agenda has focused on the residential
choices of a select demographic group, largely characterised by self-interest and personal
affluence as well as a desire for disengagement. However, this is to miss much of the point
at stake in the analysis of gating. Gated communities express a broader trend of private
decision-making that has wider and public ramifications. In short, the locational choices
made by affluent households affect outcomes for the poor in terms of city sustainability,
security and social segregation. If ‘forting up’ is taken to extremes this search for security
will have enormous impacts on those left outside these new enclaves. Our theme in this
introduction is that the choices of these relatively few gated dwellers may help us to
conceptualise what might be thought of as a kind of spatial contract which, if not balanced
by public intervention, may lead to a downward spiral of urban social relations. Let us
expand on what we mean by this.
Many observers have suggested that urban segregation has represented the
crystallisation of wider social divisions and problems that are largely negative in their
impact. For earlier writers, like Gans (1968), the importance of socially diverse areas lay in
the empathy generated by meeting people of different social backgrounds and experiences.
Increased concentrations of poverty and clustering along ethnic and socio-economic lines
has left many cities divided in ways that commentators believe hinders political empathy
while concentrating disadvantage and exclusion from employment and educational
 180 R. Atkinson & S. Blandy

opportunity (Massey & Denton, 1993). To read more widely from this, the residential
choices of society at large have important secondary impacts on those with least choice
and whose concentration dislocates and disconnects them from prospects for personal
development (Atkinson & Kintrea, 2002). There are, then, reasons to believe that
segregation is problematic.
The process of gating surrounds an attempt, in part, to disengage with wider urban
problems and responsibilities, both fiscal and social, in order to create a ‘weightless’
experience of the urban environment with elite fractions seamlessly moving between
secure residential, workplace, education and leisure destinations (Atkinson & Flint, 2004;
Graham and Marvin, 2001). However, this apparent floating world of the rich is still
connected to the lives of those living in other areas through the tendril linkages of taxation,
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legal contract and a system of social policy interventions which attempts to bridge and
ameliorate these social divides. Centralised taxation and spending systems cut across place
of residence and link people of diverse social positions, this much is perhaps self-evident
but is clearly significant.
Increasing ghettoisation is occurring in a bifurcated manner with groups at both the top
and bottom increasingly concentrated together in socially homogeneous areas. These
processes are linked by fiscal and social contracts but which are now threatened by calls
for at least partial fiscal autonomy by gated communities and the social withdrawal of the
affluent. As these groups pull out, the effects of social concentration and residualisation
further down a hierarchy of neighbourhood desirability are increased. Another way of
thinking critically about this new enclavism is to consider why ghettoisation of the poor has
so regularly been considered problematic while affluent concentration is not. The answer
by those predisposed toward market solutions is likely to be that compounded problems of
social disadvantage formed by concentrated deprivation are not to be found in areas of
concentrated wealth which are therefore the ‘answer’. However, as we contend here, these
processes are linked and mediated by the local and central state and housing market in an
increasingly inequitable way.
Gated communities appear as segregated spaces with a social ecology that is planted
into the fabric of the city; where the wall starts a new social area begins, whether one lives
inside or out. A key question remains, if this ghettoisation of the affluent proceeds how
will this affect the ameliorative social ties negotiated through the state—of welfare, social
services and of crime control for those living in ghettoised poverty? While the club system
of private access to security (Hope, 2000) allows the affluent to displace crime this access
to safety is denied those with fewer resources.
So far the debate on GCs has largely been considered in terms of whether the freedom to
make locational decisions that maximise personal security should be the overriding feature
of public policy debates about the relative value of such developments. Linking perhaps
legitimate fears to personal residential choice is difficult to challenge in the abstract and
yet, in many areas of social life where the decision to go it alone would have deleterious
consequences for others, the state regularly and legitimately intervenes to reduce negative
wider outcomes. To act as personal law-maker, to build where we like or to forego taxes
are actions intervened in by institutions of governance in order that wider impacts are
prevented. Gated communities represent a desire for accentuated positive freedoms
(the ability ‘to do’ something) but which hinder the negative freedoms (Berlin, 1958) of
others (the ability to be ‘free from’ something, such as increased crime displaced by the
presence of a GC) in adjacent neighbourhoods.
 Introduction 181

Even before getting into a debate about the relative merits of gating we find systematic
research which suggests that the shelter from fear that gated communities appear to
represent soon fades once residents move in. Research by Low (2003) suggests that living
‘behind the gates’ actually promotes fear of the unknown quantities of social contact
outside them. The lack of predictability and experience of people in social situations
outside these compounds appears to play out most strongly for the young, particularly
those brought up in gated communities.
In fact, perceived safety and actual crime rates have been found to be no different
between gated communities and similar, but non-gated, high-income American
neighbourhoods. This research suggested that a sense of community was higher in the
non-gated neighbourhoods (Wilson Doenges, 2000; confirmed by Sanchez et al.,
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forthcoming). These various issues lead us into a whole new area: the long-run
consequences of creating enclave-style developments. What happens to people who live in
areas where social distinction is also expressed through clear physical boundaries
(between a socially homogeneous affluent group and the mass beyond the gates)?
The impacts of withdrawal by select social groups has wider implications for how we
evaluate social justice in the city context. We suggest that the internal contract of GCs
represents a threat to what might be thought of as a spatial contract between
neighbourhoods of differing social characteristics. As private governance has grown, the
concentration effects of poverty and problems of crime displacement have been
systematically layered onto an urban poor already weighed down by a wide range of local
problems. In other words, GCs can be seen as undermining local and central state
responsibilities to at least attempt to create equity of outcome between neighbourhoods of
different social characteristics and qualities. This is such a central concern of much writing
on GCs that it is surprising that so little hard evidence exists.
Most commentators consider the effect of GCs to be socially divisive, while it has been
suggested by some in the British policy community that the security features of GCs could
tempt owner occupiers to ‘colonise’ more deprived neighbourhoods, thus creating mixed
communities or what might be better termed ‘citadel gentrification’. However, results
from an analysis of the 2001 American Housing Survey, by Sanchez et al. (forthcoming),
are somewhat surprising. They found a prevalence of low-income, racial minority, renters
living in GCs. The extent to which US public housing projects are walled and gated is
illustrated by results showing that tenants are nearly 2.5 times more likely than owners to
live in GCs. The study provides a baseline for tracking the racial and income mix within
American GCs over time. This challenge to the image of private affluence, underpinned by
an apparent democratisation of gating, is perhaps no less depressing in its impression of
cellular and parallel lives lived in, and driven by, fear.

Joining the Club: The Drivers and Governance of Gated Communities

The contributions to this volume come from across the globe, with papers from Brazil,
Taiwan, Argentina, Germany, China, Canada, the UK and the US, highlighting both the
widespread proliferation of and interest in GCs. The authors offer empirical data on the
effects of GCs in different locations and political contexts, and many of the contributions
address more than one of the themes outlined in this introduction.
One major concern is to provide a convincing account for the growth of GCs. Webster
has previously drawn on economic theory to explain the way in which residents group
 182 R. Atkinson & S. Blandy

together to provide services which the state can no longer adequately deliver, suggesting
that private neighbourhoods have much in common with public government at the local
level (see for example, Webster, 2002). A closer reading, in this volume, of the history of
Taiwanese homeowner associations by Chen and Webster leads them to conclude that
these organisations suffer from many of the same problems as conventional municipal
government. The contribution from Wu here finds that club goods theory, rather than flight
from fear, provides an explanation for the transition from work-unit compounds to gated
commodity housing enclaves in urban China, another example of what Wu here terms ‘the
worldwide restructuring towards entrepreneurial governance’.
Glasze here develops these themes, arguing that club goods theory is insufficient to
explain the historically and regionally differentiated development of GCs. He suggests
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that the crucial question of power has been overlooked, and further that club goods theory
is inadequate when evaluating the potentially divisive consequences of GCs, which
naturally tend to look after the interests of their members only. Glasze further proposes
that more attention should be paid to the role of the state, on a national, regional and local
level, when attempts are made to explain the rise of gated developments. Evan McKenzie
(1998) has previously suggested that this is dependent on the relationship between three
vectors: the developer, potential residents, and ‘the municipality’, with multiple forces
acting on each of the three, so that outcomes are affected, for example, by the price of land
or the relative affluence of the municipality. In his paper, McKenzie applies his analysis to
the rapid development of GCs in and around Las Vegas, where local government takes the
lead in promoting GCs because they represent growth, increased tax revenues and less
public expenditure. The municipalities now require new developments to be managed by
homeowner associations and, while property developers are happy to go along with this,
purchasers have no choice in the matter.
Discussion of the relationship between these three vectors again emerges in other papers
in this volume; for example, Chinese local authorities accept GCs as they relieve the
municipality of its administrative and public service burden (Wu), whereas Thuillier
shows how Argentinian GC developers and residents are able to play off competing
municipalities against each other, and keep down local taxes. We find in Chen and
Webster’s paper that the Taiwanese government now has the power to insist on
homeowner associations as the accepted form of governance in new developments, as in
McKenzie’s analysis of Las Vegas. There are no examples here of successful government
control of GCs. Again Grant’s work here shows Canadian planning authorities to be
struggling with the same issues as English planners (see Atkinson et al., 2004, and Manzi
& Smith-Bowers, this volume), in a context where GCs are a new, and rare, phenomenon
not (yet) aggressively marketed by property developers. For very different reasons, local
government in Argentina appears powerless to control the dynamic growth of GCs
(Thuillier).

Contractual Neighbourhood Governance and Citizenship

We have argued that the contractual legal framework is an essential characteristic of GCs.
These detailed rules indicate a different and much more formal structure than the
framework of informal rights and rules developed in a neighbourhood through
“neighbours understanding the importance of maintaining a shared and reciprocated set
of values and neighbourhood attributes” (Webster, 2003, p. 2606). It has been suggested
 Introduction 183

that GCs are an example of a much wider rise in contractual governance, resulting from the
new relationship between state, market and civil society, designed to address concerns
about social order: the contract of membership takes centre stage in the age of
‘responsibilisation’, in which “exclusion from club goods may be tantamount to exclusion
from key aspects of citizenship” (Crawford, 2003, p. 500).
The contractual nature of GCs implies a sense of choice by each party entering into a
contract, voluntarily accepting its future restrictions, whereas research shows that GC
residents appear unaware of the details of what they are signing up to. A 1989 survey in 12
Californian counties found that only 27 per cent of resale purchasers had read the
covenants and then only when accused of breaching them (Silverman et al., 1989).
In another American study, less than 10 per cent of residents had read the legal documents
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prior to purchase (Alexander, 1994). Similar findings appear in two of the contributions in
this volume. In their study of an English GC, Blandy & Lister found a general lack of
awareness of the details of the legal framework for self-management by residents, and
ignorance of (as well as indifference to) the covenants. Here, McKenzie describes the rules
of American homeowner associations as “incomprehensible and non-negotiable”. He
concludes that, far from a voluntary community bound by contract, GC purchasers have an
enforced relationship with their homeowner association. It is only if the conceptual
framework of contract is stretched to breaking point that GCs, at least in England and the
US, can be seen as a form of genuine self-management. Crawford tacitly acknowledges
this when he includes in his examples of contractual governance those which “have
emerged in part as problem-solving devices” (Crawford, 2003, p. 481).
In the case of GCs, it seems that the provisions of property and contract law have been
used to facilitate a built form that appeals to both developers and residents. However, one
party frequently enters this particular contract either because there is no alternative, or at
least in ignorance of the legal implications. This provides a challenge to club goods theory
in which, far from being the rational choice of economic actors maximising security,
buying into the ‘community’ may be a simple lifestyle preference in which the trappings of
onerous legal details and coercive clauses are simply ignored. While the economics of the
context are understood by the various players, it is in the social aspect of the model that
residents find themselves internally ‘outcast’ for infractions like flying a flag on the wrong
day or having the wrong size or type of car. Many potential residents may fail to anticipate
that the price of ‘total’ security is the loss of many such minor liberties.
In his paper, Glasze characterises GC homeowner associations as ‘territorial
shareholder democracies’ and points to a number of difficulties that may arise in this
privatised model of governance. Two papers in this volume also consider whether social
capital within the development is enhanced by the fact that GC residents are contractually
bound together. Blandy & Lister’s paper suggests that residents see covenants as a
substitute for community controls and sanctions, and that the ‘community’ of residents is
characterised by weak ties. In his analysis of GCs in Las Vegas, McKenzie argues that the
legal governance arrangements do not encourage a localised identity, but that the GC
operates more as an economic collective which provides services traditionally seen as the
task of local government. Chen & Webster address similar issues in their application of
Olson’s theory of the problems of collective action to homeowner associations in Taiwan.
Although resident participation in Taiwanese GCs is specifically promoted by property
management companies, there is evidence of a general reluctance to join resident
management boards. In the new Chinese private gated enclaves, Wu’s contribution shows
 184 R. Atkinson & S. Blandy

that residents’ desire for anonymity, and reluctance to participate in ‘unnecessary’ social
interaction, means that management and governance are largely left to professional
property companies.
As a result of these common features of the legal framework, and residents’ attitudes to
them, GCs worldwide are prone to internal dissent and vulnerable to the possibility that a
powerful minority may impose its will on the majority (see McKenzie, this volume).
In recognition of these problems, a number of countries are now introducing regulation of
homeowner associations, for example, requiring them to hold minimum sinking funds or
to hold regular elections. McKenzie’s paper sets out the different approaches taken by
three state legislatures in the USA. This raises the possibility that an interesting cycle may
be emerging whereby privately governed neighbourhoods develop to provide goods which
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local government is inefficient at providing, but the private regime then becomes
oppressive to the residents who are ‘club members’, and itself has to be curbed by
government legislation.
The theme of segregation, and the effect of physical boundaries in the differentiation of
‘them and us’, is addressed by Roitman and others here. Both Thuillier’s and Roitman’s
papers examine fortified GCs with fearful affluent occupiers, in the context of a highly
polarised society in Argentina. Moving to the west coast of the US, Le Goix presents the
first large-scale analysis of segregation patterns in GCs and their surrounding
neighbourhoods by integrating a GIS database with data from the 2000 Census on more
than 200 GCs in the Los Angeles area. He finds that GCs have a negative impact, causing
what he terms the reinforcement of ‘segregation within segregation’, especially relating to
age and socio-economic status.
Finally, Manzi & Smith-Bowers provide empirical evidence from two case studies in
London, arguing that gates and other security features are needed to convince owner
occupiers to move into (and remain in) areas where the fear of crime is high. While their
presence appears to reduce segregation at the neighbourhood level, the reality is a divided
area; interviews carried out by the authors indicate that the GC residents do not mix at all
with residents outside the gates. This contribution stands out in its relatively positive
reading of the potential for gated communities to make some contribution to social
integration, thereby providing a counter-point to the generally negative impressions given
by other authors.

Conclusion: Liberated Enclosure?

Gated communities represent a new or at least relatively novel form of housing
development in the European context and their number is increasing. With growing
consumer and media interest the US and South African models of such development may
form templates for understanding this direction in preferences, primarily directed by fear,
privacy and predictability. What is less clear is why such development is growing in
societies characterised by lower prevailing crime rates and higher levels of social
cohesion. In this sense perhaps gated communities might be seen as barometers indicating
the future shape and scale of social forces linked to social fear and aspirations toward
ex-territoriality (Bauman, 2000). In this sense the significance of gated communities lies
less in their number and more in what they say about a wider bundle of social pressures
now directing where and how people live.
 Introduction 185

For housing researchers, gated communities intersect important threads of urban theory
and empirical profiling as well as normative and political ideas about what kinds of
housing we want to see provided in our towns and cities. Certainly for many academics
gated communities have provided a rich vein for research since they conflict with the
personal politics and wider ideals often enshrined in planning frameworks as well as
attempts at achieving relative social justice and balance in the neighbourhood context.
Gated communities are the clearest indication that unimpeded consumer and developer
choice threatens these wider aspirations. The appeal to legitimacy by supporters of gated
development has been based on the notion that people’s preferences are increasingly based
on fear because the state has not fulfilled its contract in delivering safety. However, as we
have argued here, these choices are not without wider impacts and have been shown to
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amplify personal fears, crystallising patterns of segregation, and displacing crime.

The withdrawal of the generally affluent into gated enclaves presents us with a range of
possibilities. First, a loss of social diversity in the neighbourhoods that they have left
leading to a residualisation of exited locales, thus reinforcing tendencies toward social
segregation. Second, the displacement of crime away from increasingly hardened targets,
inhabited by those who can afford access to security, towards those areas which present
softer targets. Finally, gating represents a spatial withdrawal of elite groups that threatens
what we have described as a spatial contract between neighbourhoods in cities mediated
by central and local states. Services for poorer areas may suffer as a result of the opting out
of municipal provision that has been argued for by many gated communities in the US,
which have their own privatised fiscal arrangements and revenues.
This brings us back full circle to arguments about the purpose of central civic bodies
which collect and disburse resources to the benefit of all members of a society. The club
good of security and neighbourhood services represented by gated communities resemble
new medieval city-states wherein residents pay dues and are protected, literally as their
‘citizens’. With the growth of these gated mini-states, the argument has been that gated
residents should not have to pay twice for services they already receive. This may
ultimately have the effect that entitlements to vital aspects of citizenship, such as security,
welfare and environmental services, become based on which neighbourhood one lives in.
With concerns currently running high about ‘postcode (zipcode) lotteries’ relating to
educational, welfare and health service access, these problems look set to take on a greater
analytical significance in the future.
The papers in this volume reflect on these and other issues and provide a range of both
explanatory and descriptive frameworks for trying to understand why gated communities
have arisen, why they persist and whether or not normative theories of the good city should
challenge gated neighbourhoods as desirable in a context of wider social justice in the city.
No doubt this volume will not be the last word on what continues to present a controversial
topic for analysis by urban and housing researchers.

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Deputy Prime Minister).
 186 R. Atkinson & S. Blandy

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