The purpose of this research is to examine the phenomenon of the rise in the number of gated communities for the upper middle class of the United States. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical, social, and cultural context for the increase of gated-community living, and then to discuss how such communities manifest and/or respond to such issues as elitism, concern for personal safety, privacy, communitarianism, and isolation.
In the 1990s, an estimated 8-10 million middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans have become residents in so-called gated communities, at their extreme described as "walled medieval enclaves replete with gates and private security forces" (McCormick, 1998, p. 45). Equally, some 8.5 million poverty-class residents live in an estimated 3,000 ghetto or declining urban neighborhoods, up from about 1,200 such neighborhoods in the 1980s. The polarization of affluence and poverty in the U. S. can be partly understood with reference to custom, practice, and beliefs regarding theories of social structure in Western culture. Social theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Marx are hardly in agreement about how society ought to be structured. Nor are these theories of social structure the only ones informing Western discourse. But what these theories share is a focus on relationships between individual and the state, with the state functioning, as needed, as a mediator of relationship patterns between individuals. Power, state, and property predominate as issues, whether, as in the case of Locke, property is the principal foundation of a rational and just civil society (Locke, 1992, p. 293); property is one among many objects of the perpetual "state of war" that would exist were the state not present to prevent wholesale slaughter (Hobbes, 1992, p. 238); or, as in the case of Marx, property is analyzed as the reason that stable civil society is both irrational and unjust (Marx, 1992, p. 472).
Whether a...