Gated Communities in Latin American Megacities: Case Studies in Brazil and Argentina

Abstract

Within recent years, the expansion of gated communities has become an increasingly important element in the changing Latin American megacities and their suburban areas. In this paper, the internal structure and differentiation as well as sociospatial consequences of gated communities will be discussed, based on case studies from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. The increasing fortification of the privileged is a visible consequence of the continuing intensification of social disparities and spatial fragmentation. Gated communities in Latin American cities which are generally planned as a whole by project developers and designed with sophisticated security measures, can be classified according to their location into innercity and suburban types. They represent an especially dynamic real estate product with a high return of capital. Public control has, by far, less relevance than private interests. Therefore, gated communities can be seen as ‘new extraterritorial spaces’. Within recent years, particularly, large edge-city-like projects have emerged in suburban areas. The success of gated communities can mainly be accounted for by the fear of crime. In this sense, they respond to social conflict and violence in the everyday life of the cities. At the same time, they are an expression of the increasingly diverging lifestyles of urban society under the influence of globalisation. With gated communities, new islands of wealth emerge in the ocean of poverty, which characterise the increasingly fragmented structure of the Latin American city.

Gated communities and urban fragmentation in Latin America: the Brazilian experience

“…Inner-city condomínios are normally formed by apartment house complexes, which are not only gated and surveyed, but contain at the same time sophisticated recreational and supply infrastructures. This is the typical situation of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro (Coy & Pö hler, 2002a). However, the differences between inner-city condomínios and 'normal' apartment houses become more and more unclear because only 90% of apartment houses in Sã o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were gated at the end of the 1990s.…”

“…The 1970s can be considered as a decisive turning point, because that is when the first gated housing complexes appeared in the Brazilian metropoles. Some megaprojects, which were entirely planned and completed by project developers, had an exemplary effect on subsequent phases: Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro, and especially the Alphaville project in the surroundings of Sã o Paulo (Coy & Pö hler, 2002a). In their internal structure, their project execution, as well as in their marketing concepts, these projects were clearly modelled after North American examples (Blakely & Snyder, 1997).…”

Disruption, yet community reconstitution: subverting the privatization of Latin American plazas

“…The spatiality of Latin America's changing social fabric, characterized by exclusion, inequality and heightened disenfranchisement, has generated enormous interest among scholars of urban change in Latin America (Navia and Zimmerman 2004). Attention has focused on how neoliberalism has demarcated new ''winners and losers'' (Svampa 2001), resulting in the rapid expansion of new islands of wealth amongst oceans of poverty (Coy and Pohler 2002). Growing feelings of insecurity and fear among the rich is manifested in numerous barrios cerrados (fortified enclaves; Caldeira 2000) in large cities such as Buenos Aires (Thuillier 2005), Santiago (Borsdorf and Hidalgo 2008), and Sao Paulo (Sposito 2002), and smaller urban areas, including Montevideo (Alvarez-Rivadulla 2007) and Managua (Rodgers 2004).…”

Fragmenting and isolating neighbourhoods: a way of creating flexible spaces and flexible behaviours?

“…Many researchers throughout the world present examples of physically separated spaces surrounded by walls and fences behind which housing-estate communities spend their lives. 'Spatially isolating communities' can be found in Saudi Arabia (Glasze and Alkhayyal 2002), in cities of South America (Coy and Pöhler 2002), the Republic of South Africa (Jürgens and Gnad 2002), Canada (Grant and Mittelstead 2004), the British Isles (Webster 2001), Indonesia (Leisch 2002), and southern Europe (Munoz 2003). Blakely and Snyder (1997) observe that gated communities develop as a result of a shaken sense of safety of the city dwellers, but also because of their need to emphasise the preferred lifestyle or membership of a specified social category.…”