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Basak Tanulku, Independent Consultant, Turkey
In the last couple of decades, cities all over the world have become segregated into an endless patchwork of shopping malls and multi-purpose complexes leading to a neo-medieval age. Gated communities are an important part of this urban process, founded against the general norm of open urban space and mixed urban culture. They receive significant attention in academic circles especially in the fields of human geography, planning, and housing. The growing attention to the analysis of gated communities has created a literature consisting of different research perspectives and different contexts of investigation and consequently, diverse definitions. A definition, stripped from any socio-cultural and historical context comes from Roitman: gated communities usually refer to various types of residential and/or office complexes closed to outsiders by different mechanisms such as walls, gates, and fences and protected against potential dangers by security guards and CCTV cameras. Gated communities are composed of spatial (walls and gates), social (population characteristics) and legal mechanisms (rules of conduct managing life inside these spaces) (Roitman, 2010).
A Common Urban Form
Gated communities are not the first developments characterised by walls, fences and an exclusive lifestyle closed to the rest of society. Rather, there were similar forms of gating seen in different parts of the world reflecting a common trend especially among the upper classes wishing to retreat from the masses (Blakely & Snyder, 1997; Low, 2003; Sassen, 2012). Similarly, contemporary gated communities are usually interpreted as an upper class desire for status, community life, belonging, and security within a neoliberal urban context, which have become more popular since the late 1970s and early 1980s.
However, as discussed in the book edited by Bagaeen and Uduku (2012), gated communities do not have the same meaning for all. Rather, the authors demonstrate differences in terms of the factors underpinning their development, their impacts on wider urban realms and meanings across societies. For example, in developed countries such as New Zealand, gated communities mostly reflect a search for a lifestyle, and/or way to share and reduce the costs of common amenities leading to more sustainable lifestyles (Dupuis & Dixon, 2012). Instead, particularly in developing countries, gated communities reflect larger socio-economic issues and concerns about increasing crime levels. For example, in the Latin American context, gated communities are seen to increase socio-spatial fragmentation, inequality, urban sprawl, and environmental degradation (Roitman & Giglio, 2012). In China (Tomba, 2012) and the Middle East (Bagaeen, 2012), gated communities reflect a wish to return to a more traditional way of life. The literature also demonstrates that in the developing world, gated communities also reflect the wish to imitate Western way of lif