The global spread of gated communities One of the most striking features of recent urbanisation is the rise in popularity of privately governed residential, industrial, and commercial spaces. In many rapidly urbanising countries, gates and guards appeared at a time of double-digit economic growth and generated little public or academic commentary öthey were simply part of the surreal economic and spatial transformation that engulfed so many countries in the last two decades of the 20th century. In more established urban economies, proprietary developments seem more obviously to enclose what were previously regarded as public domains. This led to widespread discussion about the implications for civic society, fiscal solvency, social exclusions, and efficient service delivery and about the impact of global capital and real estate markets on urban social and spatial structure. In a study that compared condominiums in Sa¬ o Paulo with gated communities in Los Angeles, Caldeira (1996, page 320) concluded`T he Garden City model, modernist design and city planning, and now the fortified enclaves,`outer cities', and theme parks are part of the repertoire from which different cities around the world are now drawing.'' Developers, landowners, investors, and consumers have together shaped a new genre of modern urban habitat. An increasingly sophisticated mass market has emerged in entire neighbourhoods, comprising homes, community infrastructure, services, and microurban governance. Gates and guards are just one part of a bigger package. The phenomenon is a spontaneous one and it has spread rapidly within and between countries. Its significance lies not so much in the physical impact of gated developments, though this may pose challenges to urban designers, but in their underlying sociology, politics, and economics. In short, they challenge the spatial, organisational, and institutional order that has shaped modern cities. Up to now, discussion about the causes and consequences of proprietary developments (also called club communities) has been largely inspired by observations in the big cities of the USA. In their much-cited study, Blakely and Snyder (1997) estimated that up to 9 million US residents live in 3 million units in around 20 000 proprietary residential communities bounded by walls and entrance gates. By 1999 Phoenix, Arizona had 320,000 of its citizens, or 12% of the Metro Phoenix population, living in 641 gated communities (Frantz, 2001). Using data from the Community Association Institute, in figure 1 (see over) we sketch the boom of gated and guarded condominiums and communities in the USA. More significant is the rise in the number of community associations. These are contractual associations that deliver some form of neighbourhood-level governance in the form of regulations and local civic goods and services on the basis of assessments (fees) collected from members. The Community Association Institute estimates that by 2002, 47 million Americans were living within 231 000 community associations and that 50...
The authors analyze the cultural, economic, and political background of new gated housing estates in the Arab world with the aid of case studies in Lebanon and Riyadh. Their question is to what extent these developments represent a reappearance of the fragmented settlement patterns in many of the old towns. On the one hand, new compounds of several villas and common facilities housing extended families in Riyadh may be interpreted as a revival of certain sociospatial settings in the old town, in which extended families often shared a common courtyard. The compounds for Western foreigners in Saudi Arabia follow the principle of spatial seclusion of social groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds—a principle of the sociospatial organization of many old towns in the Arab world. The emergence of gated housing estates in Lebanon, on the other hand, has obvious and specific sociopolitical origins in the 20th century. The failure of public regimentation and provision created a gap, which was partially filled by the private sector. For their mostly wealthy clientele, gated housing estates offer private small-scale solutions to nationwide problems.
In many countries across the world, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are seen as a new model of sub-municipal governance to secure private capital for improving the attractiveness of a city’s central spaces. Originating from North America (Canada and the United States), this model of self-taxing districts, often based on public–private partnerships, has spread to other continents, including Europe, Australia and Africa. This theme issue explores the internationalization and the contextualization of the BID model in both Northern countries (the United States, Canada, Germany and Sweden) and Southern countries (South Africa). The collection of articles focuses on key debates surrounding BIDs and presents different theoretical perspectives as well as lines of argument in relation to these debates. Relying on approaches based on political economy and local governance regimes, Foucault-inspired sociology of governance and governmentality studies or critical discourse analysis, the authors discuss the nature and significance of BIDs in relation to state restructuring and the neoliberalization of urban policies and to emergent rationalities and practices of security governance and policing arrangements. Using the recent discussions of policy transfer and ‘urban policy mobilities’, they look at the international circulation of the BID model and its local embeddedness, exploring the role of the global circuits of knowledge and the ways in which the model has been adopted and reshaped in different cities. Drawing a complex and differentiated picture of BIDs across continents and cities, this collection of articles emphasizes both the need for more comparative research across diverse urban experiences and contexts and the relevance of a relational perspective in urban studies that blurs the traditional lines of separation between studies of Northern and Southern cities.
This paper contributes to the debates on policy mobilities by examining Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Germany as examples of contested, failed and unfinished travelling policies. Recent debates on policy mobilities opened a fruitful discussion on how policies are transferred from one place to another and the complex processes that rework places and policies in heterogeneous ways. While we are sympathetic to this literature, there are theoretical and empirical gaps to be addressed. It is frequently stated that processes around the transfer and grounding of policies are complex, and that outcomes are far from secure. However, the empirical focus in most cases is on transfers that are more or less "successful", or at least portrayed as being successful by their advocates. In contrast to this "success bias" in research and public discourse, we argue that it is helpful to focus more closely on failures, resistances and contradictions. Judging from work on the transfer of BIDs -an almost classical example of successfully mobilized urban policies -we argue that it is helpful to reflect on unfinished policy mobilities, that is, the failure of mobilized urban policies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.