Gated Communities in the U.S.

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 predom

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blic spaces (Stark, 1998). Gated-community advocates, meanwhile, applaud privatizing street and patrol services inside the privately owned "public" spaces of the community while rejecting BID projects or anti-gang neighborhood barriers that alter access to public roadways and spaces. The result has been a paradox and a blur of where controversy over gated areas and public-private access lies: The older controversy typically pits egalitarian gate critics against freedom-loving gaters, who cite their rights to do whatever they want with their own private property. On the public streets, however, the egalitarians favor gates and the more libertarian-minded oppose them. . . . To be an egalitarian might dispose you to insist on gates for public streets . . . . But it can just as easily impel you to attack the gates erected by private communities . . . . Libertarians will defend gates in private communities but revile them on public streets (Stark, 1998, pp. 72-3). Even though the physical and social construction of gated communities may be shaped differently, the ultimate image is of polarization, not blur. As a practical matter, this means restricting racial and class access to what would otherwise be public space (streets, parks, a
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