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Article Excerpt
After decades of moving up into urban towers, the Brazilian elite is now moving out to gated subdivisions on metropolitan fringes. In these compounds the wealthy can relax without fear as armed guards circulate on motorcycles and high-tech firms provide surveillance. As elsewhere in the world, developers intensely market to prospective buyers the sense of security the gates provide (Davis 1992; Luymes 1997; Andrade 2006). The gated communities offer a bucolic counterpoint to urban life, and often function as vacation or weekend destinations. The design and isolation of these subdivisions allow families to forego the protective walls that encircle each of their urban homes, and they can display their gardens and homes to the street. They can jog, take walks, and be neighborly, much as they might in the Brazilian interior or, as many say, as they imagine life in U.S. suburbs.
But during the week, when the owners are in the city, the citizens of these gated subdivisions are the hundreds of people who maintain the grounds and clean the homes. Gated communities regulate the circulation of workers with a system that requires renewal of badges and proof of good conduct. But are these workers a challenge to security, or essential to it? How do their freedom and circulation fit into the high-tech image and strategic design that most of the gated communities wish to project? How does their relationship with homeowners square with the image that most critics have drawn of the gated subdivision as a space of social segregation and insulation?
Security comes not only from design and surveillance of space or from the screening of workers by homeowners associations but also from practices that give domestic workers intimate access to homes. These informal practices are largely unregulated by homeowners associations but intensely negotiated by owners and domestic workers. The growing spatial distance between the rich and poor that most literature on gated communities emphasizes would presuppose heightened mistrust, yet one of the most enduring qualities of Brazilian society has been a complex infusion of servility and intimacy in relationships between the rich and poor (Lauderdale Graham 1988; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Such intimacy is found in other countires, (1) but it is pervasive in the middle and upper classes in Brazil and can obscure the social polarization on which it rests. In this article I show that the social polarization inherent in these relationships is reconfigured and negotiated in ways that are specific to these spaces.
The prestige that comes from hiring urban-based professional landscapers, and the regulation of domestic workers in gated communities by homeowners associations, potentially contradict gardeners' perceptions of their own responsibilities, prestige, and power. The displacement of traditional domestic work by new forms of regulation and by professionalization will not do away with this work or destroy the intimacy that pervades it. If segregation--symbolized by gates and walls--epitomizes social polarization, this does not mean that social polarization would disappear in the absence of spatial segregation--symbolized by circulation, intimacy, and proximity. However, the broader spatial context in which domestic work takes place does affect the ability of gardeners and other domestic workers to negotiate their terms of employment, making daily life more livable, and the future more predictable.
The Brazilian elite continues to depend on domestic workers despite the increasing modernity of domestic life--including the use of the newest generation of home appliances--and the incipient professionalization of services that were once entirely the domain of personal service work such as child care and food preparation. Although urban professionals have reduced their daily dependence on live-in nannies and other domestic workers, their need for gardeners and part-time domestic workers will grow as a result of their property ownership in gated communities. (2) The relationship between employer and worker includes the private worlds of workers in villages and settlements outside the gates and thus adds a regional dimension to the security and daily life of the gated compounds.
A gated community south of Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, provides examples of this intimacy not only in and around private homes but also in the surrounding settlements that property owners in gated subdivisions draw on for their workers. (Because of the personal information contained in a small sample of workers, and because of commentaries on the area's security, I do not name the gated community in this article.) Networks of kinship among workers have coalesced in villages and groups of residences outside the gates of this elite development, where almost no one is a stranger. The homeowners in the gated communities benefit from this stability, as the supporting relationships reduce the risk that "bad elements" will enter the gates. Some homeowners inside the gates build solidarity with those outside through practices that include visits, exchanges between households, payment of bus fares, purchase of homes, and, most of all, creation of a domestic space by the workers who spend much of their lives in intimacy with their employers. This mutuality is particularly strong in gated communities with controlled access and where the livelihoods of people in the surrounding neighborhoods are almost wholly dependent on these gated communities. (3)
New development, infrastructure, and transportation in the region will bring growth and higher land prices, challenging the continuity of places that have adapted to change by reinforcing tradition. Authorities have already approved plans for the development of 800 lots near the condominio (gated community) that is the subject of this study. Speculators may have exaggerated the demand for land outside the condominio in this remote valley, but their actions have set the stage for future growth that will include the dislocation of working-class and farming families. Eighty percent of the 3,000 lots in this area are vacant (IBRAM 2003). In sum, the equilibrium between gated communities and the communities outside the gates that serve their needs is fragile; but for the time being this relationship has made gated communities viable and valuable.
BRAZIL'S GATED COMMUNITIES: WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THEM?
For some, the answer to the question is "enough." Indeed, scrutiny of this mode of development in Brazil, most of which has shown gated communities to be elitist enclaves that reinforce class segregation, has been intense. (4) The tropes of elitism and segregation closely parallel analyses from case studies in the United States and Europe, which typically explain gated communities from the perspective of urban decay, white flight, immigration, and industrial collapse in world cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and London (Davis 1992). The gated compound of late-twentieth-century America expresses the exhaustion of urban sprawl that now replicates the syndrome of decay as the poor themselves flee the inner city. According to one developer from Orange County, California, planned communities provide spatial enclosure and definition--along with security--that are missing from the urban fabric (Luymes 1997, 191).
Studies of gated communities outside the United States or Europe have increased, confirming the globalization of this phenomenon (Leisch 2002; Wu and Webber 2004; Janoschka and Borsdorf 2006; Mycoo 2006; Alvarez-Rivadulla2007). The most cited study on Brazilian "fortified enclaves" is that of Teresa Caldeira (2003), who researched high-rise compounds on the suburban fringe of the city of Sao Paulo in the 1990s. In that period Sao Paulo was emblematic of the rush to leave the...
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