GATED COMMUNITES SPRAWL AND SOCIAL SEGREGATION IN SOUTH CALIFORNIA By Renaud Le Goix Gökçe Görgülü Bilge Şentürk Feryal Çay Güliz Esen Şirin Eminoğlu.

GATED COMMUNITES SPRAWL AND SOCIAL

SEGREGATION IN SOUTH CALIFORNIA

By Renaud Le Goix

Gökçe Görgülü Bilge Şentürk

Feryal Çay Güliz Esen

Şirin Eminoğlu

• Sprawl: to be spread out urbanization from urban to suburban.

• Social segregation: social discrimination.

Gated communities, which are “walled” and gated residental neighbourhoods, represent a form of urbanism where public spaces are privatized.

• Furthermore; it analyses the sprawl of gated communities in southern California and evaluates its social impact.

• This paper focuses on how local governments consider gated communities as a source of revenue and how they increase local segregation.

• The capitalist production of urban space by private firms and homeowners, has a social cost and generates spillover effects such as:

– pollution, – sprawl, – congestion,– competition for land uses, – land speculation, – free-riding.

• Interpreted as a market failure (Bator, 1958), such externalities represent a cost for the society as a whole.

To introduce how gated communities produce social exclusion, we can mention that how developers usually design them as homogeneous social environments…

Residents aresupplied with their own

• security, • roads, • recreational facilities• infrastructure• beautiful landscaping

and park areas• additional shared

facilities

They aim to avoid the spillovers of urban residential and industrial developments such as:

• crime, • increasing through traffic, • free-riding of the amenities, • urban decay,• decreasing property values due to

unwanted land-use “Agglomeration Diseconomies”

• The promotion typically focuses on sport and leisure amenities and family life.

• It is called Common Interest Devolopments (CIDs), aiming to protect property values through design policies and Covenant, Conditions and Restriction.

• But gated communities are far more than a regular CID. Excluding themselves from the public, gated communties are then referred as a “club”.

Gated Communities and Urban Sprawl

Blakely and Snyder (1997) have identified three major types of gated communities:

• ‘Elite or golden-ghetto communities’ based on prestige

• ‘Lifestyle communities’ where the exclusive access to leisure facilities is involved.

• ‘Security zone communities’ where safety is the main concern of residents

The Location in Los Angeles

• The number of housing units located behind 219 gated community in 2000 can be estimated to be 80 000 (an estimate of 230 000 inhabitants).

• In the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area 11.7 percent of the households are in walled, fenced and access controlled communities.

Three factors explain the location of gated communities in Los Angeles:

• Maximize the location rents. (for the favourite locations)

• Availability of land. (leisure oriented residential developments requires larger spaces)

• Social environment. (gated communities are located in every kind of middle-class and upper-class neighbourhood to supply housing for everyone)

A Diffusion of Gated Communities According to Suburban Sprawl Patterns

• Three diffusion processes of gated communities have occurred in the suburban areas:– A diffusion by contact between zones where gated communities

were previously developed.

– Preferred locations are where site rental is maximized, explaining the multiplication of lifestyle communities for example favouring seaside locations

– A diffusion outlining the polycentric pattern of edge-cities, with clusters of gated communities and its dynamic high-tech economy.

A Diffusion Based on a Public-Private Partnership

• Gated communities basically are implying that the developer substitutes the public government in planning and building roads, access and utilities lines.

• The public side has autority to regulate and control the development of the project in a subdivision.

A Diffusion Based on a Public-Private Partnership

• The overall cost of urbanisation is transferred to the private developer in the gated community process.

• The final buyer pay for the whole infrastructures that was made in the building process when totally purchasing his property.

• So the public spend no money for this community and the developer gets a profit by the business.

• This is a kind of transferring the urbanisation costs to the private by the government.

• The transfers of urbanisation costs to the homeowner show the interest of gated communities in the urban planning process.

• Because of the gate, no public money can be spent within the gates without the transfers.

• Otherwise the community would be builded without any public access to any public-owned facility. So the gates would eventually become useless and fail to achieve their goal.

– Build a public school within the gates

– Make public streets

– Get location rent ( for example if a gated community has a public property inside, such a “lake”)

• This would provide wealthy taxpayers to the public as property tax:

CASH COWS

• To allow the public inside the gated community:

• Relationships between public authorities and gated communities favouring the sprawl of a proper form of urbanism, the question is then: how does this affect segregation patterns?

• The private governance and the implementation of restrictive covenants lead to an implicit selection of the owners, through design guidelines, age restrictions or a selective club membership, in order to ensure the homogeneity of the neighbourhood.

• The following hypothesis can thus be formulated:

The gating and the exclusiveness create a border.

The border separates two systems: – the territorial system of the gated community,

and – the urban space where it is located.

• Gated communities should differentiate from their immediate vicinity(neighbourhood), from which homeowners are trying to protect themselves against negative spillovers (crime, property value decay, etc.), hiding behind gates.

• Because the erection of a border implies a two-way relationship between the two neighbouring territories, gated communities also produce externalities over their neighbours.

• Most well-known effect of gating: Since securitization is suffecient in gated communities causes crime redistrubition in public areas.

• The negative effect of gating over social segregation, relying on the following assumption:

• If the overall differentiations occurring between gated enclaves and their vicinities are higher than the differentiations usually observed in the urban area between two adjacent neighbourhoods

• Then there is a high probability that gated communities indeed produce increased segregation.

• The discrepancy between a gated community and its vicinity is defined as a ‘discontinuity’.

• in order to focus on whether a higher degree of social differentiation occurs where gates and fences are erected.

The main characteristics of the socio-economic differentation in discontinuity level with 2000 census data of 12549 census block groups are;

• Socio-economic structure• Ethnicity• Age

• The higher absolute value of dissimilarities,the stronger discontinuity.

Discontinuity demonstrates that gated communities actually build a specific territorial system within their urban environment according to a social singularity.

According to the compares the statistical distributions, there are 4 factors and the dominant

factor is,

• age characterictics and age homogeneity

connected with living in a gated community.

• Age seem to affect a large majority of gated enclaves as a criterian for differentiation.

• From the statistical result, 95.8 % of gated enclaves are not associated with discontinuties based on ethnicity.

• Gated communities discriminate from their neighbourhood cummunities on the basis of age and economic status.

• Buffer zone protecting the gated community from a different neighbourhood.

• The location within a buffer zone promoted by the developers choosing locations within an environment protected from the deterrent effects of ethnical diversity for prospective buyers.

• While protecting the economic value and the age based homogeneity of the gated communities maximise ethnic location utility, being settled within some homogeneous ethnic environments acting as a buffer zone.

CONCLUSION

• This study highlights the gated communities are not only about architectual but also “wall” the public side by the effects of enclosure.

• Gated communities are also desirable for local governments.

• Gated communities do not increase segragation on their own. Public strategy(attractive taxpayers) and private strategy (developers) create that production of urban spaces.

• Also public earn their own share from the process.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE…• As a group, we all like the topic since the

article provide us to become aware of the gated communities by both private and public side.

• We consider the advantage and disadvantages of gated communities by authors approach.

• But there is not enough database of gated communities which is based on same sources.

GATED COMMUNITIES IN

TURKEY

• With modernization and socio-economic changes, gated communities are new trend in housing market.

• Developers find a new strategy with the increasing life standards.

• But what makes gated communties so desirable?

• The popularity of gated communities is rising nationwide as the country deals with concerns about safety, comfort, security and elite enviroment.

Advantages• There is no through traffic.• The neighbourhood is safer for children.• Gated communities can be safer from crime. • Homeowners have private and exclusive

access to sites.• Property values in large gated communities

show a better resistance to market fluctuations.

• Provides the public authorities with wealthy taxpayers, at no cost.

This is the Kemer Country Club which is a gated community from İstanbul.

• In İzmir, Mavişehir is the most known gated community. Around the area, there are high schools, malls, cinemas, sports center, restaurants for the residents.

• That is why gated communities are so desirable even they are much more expensive from the houses in the city center.

Folkart Narlıdere Konutları Projesi

• People prefer these kind of gated communities because of privacy and security. In İzmir, Folkart Narlıdere Houses is a ongoing project because of the overdemand.

DISADVANTAGES

• The gating acts as a border between the public and private systems and helps to fragment the city.

• It may encourage social segregation and increase social exclusion.

• The general public are denied access to public infrastructures and spaces when the gates are locked.

• Access control and security features represent a substantial cost for the homeowner.

• Gating can lead to a relocation of crime outside the gates and within neighbourhood non-gated communities.

• Even there are quite disadvantages of gated communities, we can see lots of examples all around the Turkey.

• Profesörler Sitesi- Bornova• Hakim Evleri – Bostanlı• Mit Evleri – Yeşilyurt• Akmerkez Residans – İstanbul• BJK Plaza – İstanbul

• There are some studies about gated communities in Turkey:– Levent and Gülümser (2004)– Güzey (2006)

• Both articles claim that gated communities in Turkey which is located in mostly big cities depends on unfair income distribution.

• Therefore the impact of gated communities is the visible side of the socio-economic differentiation.

THANKS FOR

ATTENTION