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Article Excerpt
Americans were concerned about the threat to personal freedom posed
by the conformism and homogeneity inherent in mass-consumption society. They longed for connection in their pursuit of suburban affluence. --New York Times, May 2002
In the Western world, the half-century between 1930 and 1980 was a period of public-sector expansion. From the crisis measures in the 1930s and the wartime economy of the 1940s to the egalitarian 1960s and the finishing touches of the affluent 1970s, the welfare state expanded in different national forms. From the 1980s on, the movement has been clearly in the opposite direction: wave after wave of attempts at reducing the public sector, through the transfer of ownership as well as the introduction of private-sector elements--market mechanisms, governance and management methods--in the public sector. This is a two-pronged movement of "privatization": privately owned organizations taking over public functions and private-sector methods entering public organizations.
The greatest wave of privatization has been in the delivery of collective services, transportation, power, and communication, especially. The arguments for such service privatization have been mostly pragmatic: an expectation of increased efficiency through the use of market mechanisms. Yet privatization has gone further than service provision: the core public function of maintaining peace and providing security is also being partially privatized. This would come as a great surprise to the classical theorists of the state. In the words of Adam Smith, "it is the wisdom of the state only, which can render the trade of the soldier a particular trade separate and distinct from all others." (1)
Security privatization takes several forms. They vary between societies and groups: security services can be purchased by states that employ private armies and by citizens who rent security guards; security goods, from alarms to Alsatians, likewise, constitute a growing market. (2) This article looks at one specific form of private security, a combination of goods and services, perhaps a security lifestyle: "gated communities." In large parts of the United States, a considerable amount of new residential construction takes such a form. Gated communities can be defined as "multi-unit, master-planned developments where resident owners must be members of a homeowner association and share ownership of common facilities, including a surrounding fence with a gate." (4)
Gated communities exist not only in the United States: they are also found in a number of Third World countries, where pockets of wealthy citizens are fencing themselves off from the general squalor. (5) In the wealthy countries, however, only the United States has any significant number, and there is no doubt that they are not only a sign of social inequality and cultural distance but also a cause of growing inequality. Apart from a few "prototypes," they began to develop in Florida, where a growing population of wealthy pensioners felt threatened by the increasing group of poor, restless people coming in from Latin America, particularly Cuba. Pensioners have been the driving force in much of later development, but they are far from the only customers for private residential protection.
Although the most spectacular developments are still for pensioners (e.g., the Leisure World and Sun City developments; like most U.S. consumer goods, some of these built communities are mass-marketed and sold as brand names), the movement is broader. In California, around one-half of all new residential building involves gated communities, and upwards of 40 percent of the more recent construction may already be behind fences. (6) Gating is a broad and powerful trend. In this article, which takes the San Diego region as an example of a strong tendency toward gating and fencing, I discuss the consequences of building gated communities in terms of the governance of public safety.
The first section presents gated communities in a framework of a general trend in governance toward privatization in the double sense indicated above. The second section addresses some tendencies that have been discussed in public-security literature, where privatization is related to the post--welfare state and its management of risk and security. In the third section, the emergence and the governance of gated communities in the San Diego region of Southern California is related to those trends and tendencies.
Innovations in Governance
The privatization of public safety is one element in the changes in governance characteristic of late modernity. A new "governmentality" is developing, a new rationality applied in regulating the affairs of organizations and communities. The dominant neoliberal ideology has mixed belief in the market with individualistic thinking and communitarian features (7) and, in terms of governance, developed an emphasis on "self-governance," or "technologies of the self." (8) These are modes and forms of organizing and acting that, on one hand, involve the active subject, directing its own future along a self-chosen course; on the other hand, it is assumed that those active subjects are amenable to group pressure and act in conformity. Self-governance is self-chosen and self-administered, but not in a vacuum. Social norms and market-based cultural stereotypes frame the choices and narrow the selections--otherwise, there would be no governance, no regularity and predictability, only anarchy.
The idea of self-governance could be said to be "postmodern," in the sense that instead of overarching models, grand narratives, and historical schemes, it privileges individual and situational choice. This, however, also excludes the possibility of something radically different: all options are on the same level, everybody picks from the same stock of ideas, and no choices have radical, systemic consequences. Individual choice can function as governance; by being predictable and limited, individual choice can be made knowable, and hence governable. The new governmentality contains not only a preference for private ownership, private provision, self-reliance, individual choice, and market mechanisms but also an emphasis on managerialism, the professional organization and operation of institutions.
Why did this trend toward privatization and "neoliberal" governance occur? The first factor is ideological: privatizations and the managerialization of the public sector achieved a major boost in the 1980s when conservative governments ruled the major Western states. It is developing again in the first decade of the twenty-first century, after the more social-democratic interlude of the 1990s.
The ideological factor in U.S. gated communities is evident: "You do not find many Democrats in those areas" is a phrase heard a couple of times during the interviews made for this article. Very few people of African descent can be found living inside the gates. (9) A subtle language of social and racial exclusivity is employed to classify those who are not welcome. (10) The 1990s, when the trend really took off, were, despite the incumbency of a Democratic president (with many conservative standpoints), a period of strong conservative tendencies in the United States.
Like other neoliberal initiatives, gated communities are sometimes championed as efficiency improving, market-based phenomena. They may, however, constitute a clear example of the "problem of the commons": the splitting up of a community into small independent bits and making incentives to oppose most citywide initiatives is predicted to create problems with the necessary upkeep of common facilities. (11)
Ideologies in themselves are, however, not always sufficient to create change. In this instance, a second factor is the emergence of a set of new demands coming from a different citizenry. No longer a population well-structured into classes, trades, and occupations, with more people educated and feeling competent to have a say in community matters, people in these groups demand that new lifestyles have a space in society. Gated communities are...
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