New Orleans
Thursday, February 26, 2004 - Saturday, February 28, 2004

Annual Symposium by the Universities of New Orleans and Innsbruck

Stanley D. Brunn
“Gated Minds and Gated Lives” as Worlds of Exclusion and Fear
Many urban landscapes have as distinctive features walls, fences, and gates. Some of these are elaborate, decorative, threatening, and expensive, while others are simple, inexpensive, and purely functional. Fences and walls come in varying sizes, shapes, dimensions and use a variety of materials. These “property delimiting” features are constructed for various purposes, sometimes “to keep us in or behind the walls and gates,” and other times “to prevent others from entering our private spaces and properties.” While the physical walls and gates are important visible features of human landscapes, there are also “cognitive or mental” walls and fences we construct. They are constructed for many of the same reasons as physical features, viz., “to keep us secure” and “to keep a stranger out.” Sometimes these “cognitive walls” are constructed by individuals, other times by communities and even governments. In many ways these “cognitive walls and barriers” become landscapes of exclusion and fear, both to those who construct these barriers and those who are on the other side. Removing or eliminating the “cognitive barriers” is often much more difficult that removing the physical ones, but we know there are strategies and mechanisms to improve human interaction and understanding with those ‘beyond the gates and walls.” These “boundary markers,” whether on the land or in the mind, are features and constructs that are ostensibly designed for geographical demarcation and separation, not accommodation or inclusion. In this presentation, I explore the geographic expressions of these “cognitive walls and gated communities” and what they say about us as individuals, our views of strangers, and a larger society.

Evan McKenzie
Emerging trends in the regulation of private gated communities:
Common interest housing (CIDs), which includes nearly all gated communities as well as non-gated but privately governed neighborhoods, has become the predominant form of new housing construction in America. Optimistic early assessments that CIDs would prove to be a more efficient alternative to municipalities are confronted by the fact of high levels of conflict and litigation, which are proving costly to residents as well as local governments. These conflicts are often highly publicized in the press, leading to concerns in the real estate industry that the demand for such housing could be jeopardized.

There are several reasons for the conflicts, and they arise from having unpaid, untrained, volunteer directors carrying out what were once municipal government functions. First, there are financial issues, such as disputes over use of reserve funds (set aside in anticipation of inevitable repairs of major building components), conflicts of interest in dealing with contractors, and construction defects that require major repair, insurance claims, and litigation. Second, there are infringements on resident civil liberties that happen because of the lack of constitutional protections against private government abuse. Third, there is evidence that associations are emerging as political actors in their localities. In response to some of these concerns, across the nation, small but vocal anti-HOA owners groups are organizing, using the internet as their medium and gaining attention from the press. These and other problems are leading to a consensus among some policy makers and industry professionals that some sort of increased regulatory oversight may be needed, to protect both the consumers and the market for this type of housing.

However, there are now several different theories as to how to go about this. In New Jersey, there is litigation seeking to promote state constitutional rights for owners. In Nevada, a state oversight commission and an ombusdman are now operating. In California, there is increasingly detailed state legislation with which all associations must comply and renewed efforts to codify and reorganize the laws governing HOA operation. Given that common interest housing is such a large share of the new housing stock, the stakes are enormous and it is important that the reforms succeed without over-reaching. This paper examines these emerging regulatory trends and offers an assessment of their prospects.

Sarah Blandy
Gated Communities in England: Location and Typology
This paper explores the essential characteristics of gated communities: physical boundaries to restrict access by non-residents, involvement by the resident in management of the development, and legal restrictions on behaviour in and use of the properties. A national survey of planning authorities has provided data on the number and location of gated communities in England (Atkinson et al, 2003), which is here combined with the findings of a study of ‘boundary building” in deprived neihgbourhoods (Blandy et al, 2004, forthcoming). A typology of gated communities is proposed, around three sets of variables: size and building type; the provision of security, leisure, and/or ‘retirement’ facilities; and the legal framework of each development. English gated communities are diverse (compared with the categories developed by Blakely and Snyder, 1997) both in built from and purpose, and as a result of the peculiarities of English property law. Gated communities therefore have the potential to play various different roles in the overall provision of housing, which the paper goes on to discuss.

Rita Raposo
Gated Communities in Lisbon: Economy and Culture, Private and Public
We present and discuss the main elements we interpret as the important to explain the burgeoning and expansion of the gated communities phenomenon in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Firstly, we take gated communities as a privilege ‘mirror’ of some of the more recent and important global changes that affect both space and society in several parts of the world, including Portugal. We think GC’s work as an instructive reflexion of some of the main global contemporary social and spatial trends. Namely, they illustrate the recent conflation of some ‘central’ theoretical and practical social categories that since the formation of Modernity were socially defined and enforced as distinct and separated – economy and culture, private and public. Consumer culture and privatization are concepts that evidence that conflation and are fundamental to illuminate the today’s social reality of great part of the world with gated communities being a small but ‘precious’ and salient piece of it. But this is just a part of the explanation of the rising of gated communities in the case of Lisbon, as it probably happens elsewhere. Local elements are also important and decisive. Anyway, even at this ‘scale’, and least in Lisbon Metropolitan Area and generally in Portugal, gated communities seem to reflect the main social and spatial changes, which definitely makes it a privileged subject of geographical and sociological observation.

Petar Stoyanov
Private Residential Neighbourhoods in Bulgaria: a New Trend in Post Communist Urban Development
The phenomenon is isolated or walled (fenced) settlements is not unusual for Bulgaria till 1989: Datcha settlements or leisure settlements of communist rulers existed in the fringe area of Sofia, in mountain resorts or on Black Sea coast. After political change in 1989 new type of private residential neighbourhoods (walled settlements or gated communities) of western style are springing similar to the US-American gated communities. They are result of the deep alteration of Bulgarian society. These gated communities could be distinguished in two types:
1. Self-organized gated communities
2. Developer-organized communities
These two types are described by examples of two built gated communities near the capital city of Sofia: Ivanyane situated on the western periphery of the city and Mountain View Village on the southeastern periphery.

Ivan Townshend
Gated and Common Interest Communities in Canada: The Retirement Village Experience
This paper provides a broad overview of private, common interest, and gated communities in Canada, with particular reference to retirement villages, which are the most common and most rapidly growing form of private community in Canada. The development of private communities in Canada is perhaps unique in that physical or explicit gating is relatively rare. More common is an implicit or symbolic gating, which effectively partitions the private infrastructure and amenities of these communities from their surrounding neighbourhoods. The retirement village model has many similarities with other types of planned private "recreational communities" (e.g. golf course and lake communities). These developments, which also employ a range of legal restrictive covenants and CID homeowner associations, represent an earlier trend in socio-economic and recreational segregation that predates the age-segregation and recreation trend of retirement developments. Both forms of development now constitute an important share of all new residential development and continue to re-shape and stratify the social spaces of Canadian cities.

Martin Coy
Gated Communities in Latin American Megacities: Case Studies in Brazil and Argentina
Since the mid 1970’s , gated housing areas of the privileged are spreading in Latin American cities. They have to be seen as a visible consequence of the depending social disparities within Latin American societies and the resulting fragmentation of urban space. Condominios fechados (Brazil) or barrios cerrados (Argentina0 can be typified following different criteria such as formation, location, size, fittings, construction typology, as well as social structure. Three groups of actors influence the process of their expansion: the real estate companies, for which the new form of living offers an attractive market segment, the target groups, whose increasing expansion regarding security and living comfort to need to be met, and the public authorities, which have to find adequate responses concerning the further orientation of urban development. Based on case studies from Brazil and Argentina, the paper will discuss the different phases of expansion of gated communities and its reasons, the internal structure and differentiation, as well as its consequences for socio-spatial development and urban planning.

Chris Webster
Asia’s modern gated cities
While in the USA is popularly credited with inventing and exporting Common Interest Developments, there are signs that the American experience is part of more general global secular trend. Private and private-public partnership neighbourhood government is springing up in various forms in many countries and can only partly be explained by the dissemination of international real estate practices. China’s experience is instructive in this respect. Counter to intuition, Asia’s fastest growing large economy might also be the greatest innovator when it comes to entrepreneurial urban governance. A recent law requires all new major residential developments to be gated. Municipal authorities now routinely rely on private companies to supply neighbourhood management functions and vast communities are organized in various corporate-style structures. China’s new gated cities are discussed in this talk with reference to case studies from the cities of Beijing and Wuhan. These include a private suburban city of two-hundred thousand constructed and governed entirely by a for-profit company. The talk will explore the idea that proprietary neighbourhood governance is emerging world-wide to fill an institutional gap left by tax-funded modern municipal government. It will also discuss issues of efficiency and equity in the organization of cities, including competition, innovation and accountability.

Karina Landman
Who owns the Roads? Privatizing public space in South African Cities
In the past five years, the numbers of enclosed neighbourhoods have dramatically increased in South Africa. These are existing neighbourhoods that are closed off-through gates and booms across the roads. Many of these neighbourhoods are fenced or walled off as well, with a limited number of controlled entrances/exits, manned by security guards in some cases. The roads within these neighbourhoods were previously, or still is public property and in most cases, the local council is still responsible for public services to the community within the enclosed neighbourhoods. In this way, public urban space is privatized, whether formally or informally. This paper will explore the distribution of enclosed neighbourhoods in South Africa on a national scale and within two metropolitan municipalities, namely the Cities of Johannesburg and Tshwane. It will then proceed to highlight the nature and impact of these neighbourhoods on the privatisation of public space. It will also draw on a wide basis of empirical data obtained through a national survey and in-depth case studies. Finally the paper will conclude with examples of lessons learnt from South Africa and how these may relate to international experience and future city design.

Georg Glasze
New gated housing estates in the Arab World
In the cities of the Arab World the spatial seclusion of social group is not a new phenomenon. Urban research on pre-modern towns depicted the socio-spatial and material fragmentation of urban patterns in small and distinct quarters as one of the most typical characteristics of Arab cities. The purpose of this contribution is to analyze the cultural, economic and political background of new gated housing estates in the Arab World on the basis of a case study in Lebanon and a brief discussion on the compounds for expatriates in Saudi-Arabia. The question is to what extent these developments represent a re-appearance of the fragmented settlement patterns in many of the old towns. On the one hand the compounds of western foreigners in Saudi Arabia follow the principle of spatial seclusion of social groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds – a principle of socio-spatial organization of many old towns in the Arab world. The emergence of gated housing estates in Lebanon, on the other hand, has specific socio-political origins in the 20th century. The concept of urban governance enables to uncover the segmented patterns of social interaction as an important context – a sine qua non – for the development of guarded residential complexes in Lebanon.