Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States - Softcover

Blakely, Edward J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815710038 ISBN 13: 9780815710035

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, 1999

Synopsis

Gated communities are a new ""hot button"" in many North American cities. From Boston to Los Angeles and from Miami to Toronto citizens are taking sides in the debate over whether any neighborhood should be walled and gated, preventing intrusion or inspection by outsiders. This debate has intensified since the hard cover edition of this book was published in 1997. Since then the number of gated communities has risen dramatically. In fact, new homes in over 40 percent of planned developments are gated n the West, the South, and southeastern parts of the United States. Opposition to this phenomenon is growing too. In the small and relatively homogenous town of Worcester, Massachusetts, a band of college students from Brown University and the University of Chicago picketed the Wexford Village in November of 1998 waving placards that read ""Gates Divide."" These students are symbolic of a much larger wave of citizens asking questions about the need for and the social values of gates that divide one portion of a community from another.

About this title

About the Author

Edward J. Blakely is Dean of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California. His previous books include "Planning Local Economic Development" (Sage, 1994) and "Separate Societies" (Temple, 1993), winner of the 1994 Paul Davidoff award for the best book in planning. Mary Gail Snyder is at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the Back Cover

All across the nation, Americans are forting up - retreating from their neighbors by locking themselves behind security-controlled walls, gates, and barriers. An estimated 8 million Americans live in gated communities today. These communities are most popular in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Miami. This trend has become popular in both new suburban developments and older inner-city areas as residents seek refuge from the problems of urbanization. But what does it mean for the nation? Fortress America is the first sweeping study of the development and social impact of this rapidly growing phenomenon. While early gated communities were restricted to retirement villages and the compounds of the super-rich, today the majority are for the middle to upper-middle class. But even existing modest-income neighborhoods are using barricades and gates to seal themselves off. The book looks at the three main categories of gated communities and the reasons for their popularity: lifestyle communities, including retirement communities, golf and country club leisure developments, and suburban new towns; prestige communities, including enclaves of the rich and famous, developments for high-level professionals, and executive home developments for the middle class, where the gates symbolize distinction and stature; and security zones, where fear of crime and outsiders is the main motivation for fortifications. They argue that gating does nothing to address the problems it is a response to. They propose alternatives, such as emphasizing crime prevention, controlling traffic in neighborhoods, designing new developments to encourage sustainable communities, and creating metropolitan regional planning governance.

Edition details

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815710038
• ISBN 13: 9780815710035
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223