The gated community as a postmodern utopia
Résumé
Raymond Ruyer (L'Utopie et les utopies) explains that a lot of utopias are closed worlds that aim at facing the outside world which is perceived as a chaos, a means to secure and to protect the utopian world's privacy. The majority of utopias put forward a system without risks or unexpected events, a very homogeneous society, strict rules, a high level of interest for architecture and urban form, a spatial and temporal fixity and so on. These characteristics can also be spotted in gated communities, although they are not present in such a degree. Should we therefore consider the gated community as a utopia? According to Karl Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia) and Paul Ricoeur (Lectures on Ideology and Utopia), a utopia is a set of ideas trying to shake up the predominating conception of the world. Thus, utopia is the way dominated people think; it is therefore the contrary of "ideology". Hence, it seems fair to wonder whether gated communities' residents are new types of utopians. People who opted for this kind of residence in the first place were above all elites. A large part of them probably choose to live in a gated community to cope with a world in which they have lost effective control. Elites would not be as dominating as before. That's part of what Teresa Pires do Rio Caldeira explains in City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. This is where the "spatial reversal" hypothesis appears. Spatial reversal would be the transition from a first phase during which elites kept the unwanted populations outside of the privileged areas (like the haussmannisation" of São Paulo, the South-African bantustans, zoning in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century) to a second phase during which elites have to isolate themselves from unwanted populations. This spatial reversal can be examined during the twentieth century according to three points. Elites would have moved from public to private areas, from downtowns to peripheries. Thirdly, considering the United States' example, elites would have emigrated from some states (of "white emigration") to others (of "white immigration"), according to E. J. Blakely & M.G. Snyder (Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States). This transition can be studied in the United States of America, as in Brazil or in South Africa. This spatial reversal would be the consequence of a social reversal designing a society in which being a member of the elite is no longer associated with domination. In other words, elites would have adopted a utopian way of thinking and a kind of utopian residence to struggle against the ideology, a world they could not control any more.