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This article analyzes the evolution and spatial dynamics of condominium development in Toronto, the largest housing market in Canada and the site of a rapid take‐up of condominium tenure and construction over the last 40 years. The article probes the most influential policies that fostered and regulated condominium growth, and explores the implications for the continued restructuring of the city. A host of factors, including neoliberal state policies, have played a decisive role in fostering what we term condo‐ism, referring to an emerging nexus of economic development, finance, and consumption sector interests that have coalesced around condominium construction and culture. Policies have redirected growth to the urban core, channeled capital investments and young residents, and promoted gentrification, ultimately transforming the character of Toronto's central business district. The article explores these changes, and discusses their implications for contemporary emerging forms of capitalist urbanization and restructuring of the city.

This study examines the contemporary development of gated communities in Israel, linking the phenomenon to global trends in privatisation, associated with the rise of neo-liberal landscapes. It is argued that assertions on weakening state intervention and strengthening influence of the market, oversimplify the complex interplay of private developers, public planning institutions and third-sector organisations. Neo-liberal urban governance does not imply the demise of regulation, but rather its changing nature. Although public awareness of gated communities was late to develop in Israel, in part because earlier forms of gating blurred its development, evidence reveals that social and environmental third-sector organisations are important new stakeholders involved in the production of gated spaces through their impact on public policy, balancing the `disciplining' impact of market organisations.

The study of gated communities and private neighborhoods is of growing importance to the understanding of new residential space production (Low, 2003;McKenzie, 1994;Webster, 2002). However, gates, walls, and enclaves have existed for decades and centuries, being key attributes of segregated societies and fragmented space (Boal, 2002;Marcuse, 1997a;Wu, 2005). In addition to factors of self-defense, particular social groups have enclosed themselves within gates on the basis of tradition and culture. More recently, issues of political ideology, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status have been examined and captured the imagination of the media, and political and academic circles, representing distinct identities, interests, motives, values, and lifestyles.Recent studies of gated communities have challenged the overemphasis of global factorsösuch as surveillance, transnational elites, and the diffusion of an American ready-made prototypeöand of factors held in common as globalösuch as crime, fear of violence, and insecurityöin the analysis of contemporary gating processes. Such factors, although crucial for explanation, are only partial; a complementary perspective that emphasizes historical conditions, sociospatial contexts, local mechanisms, and symbolic meanings is, therefore, crucial for the analysis of gated communities (Blandy, 2006;Crot, 2006;Glasze et al, 2006). However, the local perspective as it has been used so far has been mostly limited either to an evolutionary argument, indicating that contemporary forms of gated communities are extensions of long-established residential trends, or to a discontinuous argument, highlighting early forms of enclosed residential neighborhoods that have been replaced by contemporary fortified consumer spaces. The Israeli case is different. We suggest that multiple factors operate simultaneously to produce various forms of enclosed communities characterized by parallel evolutionary routes. Hence, older forms of gated residential spaces, such as traditional and frontier enclaves, coexist and evolve alongside newer forms of postwelfare market-driven enclaves also referred to as neoliberal enclaves.

This paper is about place making in Jerusalem, an important city at the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It examines how place making in Jerusalem has had the consequence of shifting what is known as the Green Line. The Green Line represents the armistice or ceasefire boundaries following the end of the 1948 ArabIsraeli War. Development of different parts of captured territories after the 1967 War has shifted and rendered unstable perceptions of the Green Line and has wreaked havoc with prevailing conceptions over what constitutes Jerusalem. Symbolic and social boundary reconstruction is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a powerfully organized mechanism that tilts power to Israel with the use of bulldozers, bricks, and cranes as well as tanks and weapons. The shifting Green Line represents a battle line of an idea war over Israel's ability to claim legitimacy over a new Jerusalem. This paper examines the dynamic processes of how boundaries are being shifted through narratives of various actors involved in these processes.