From public neighbourhoods to multi-tier private neighbourhoods: the evolving ecology of neighbourhood privatization in Calgary

The privatization of urban space, as represented in the trend towards a wide variety of common interest developments and increasing prevalence of gated communities, is an international phenomenon. Recent research has not systematically explored the ways in which these types of developments are collectively re-shaping the public and private realms of the city at large. This empirical study of community areas in a Canadian city describes a number of historical private neighbourhood development trends and their convergence in space and time. Based on the empirical generalizations, a conceptual model is developed to illustrate how the trends may have combined to produce a new geography or ecology of space privatization within the city, one in which the older public city is being circumscribed and bounded by new territories of multi-tiered privatization.     

Urban policy and the rise of gated housing in post-socialist Poland

The aim of this article is to investigate regulations regarding housing and spatial planning to determine the extent to which these have influenced the development of gated housing in Poland since 1989. The focus is on how government policy with regard to spatial planning and housing, together with the law on property and ownership, influences the emergence and development of gated forms of housing in the country. Legal regulation documents concerning issues of housing and spatial planning between 1990 and 2013 have been studied. The article argues that the liberal policies and legal regulation in the country is resulting in a disregard for spatial planning and housing, but also the lack of integrated urban policies. Existing spatial plans are of a consultative nature and bear no regulatory capacity, at the same time as housing programmes and spatial planning in the country is strongly in favor of private investors and new construction. All these shortcomings have created a differentiated housing market, one in which housing developers maximize their profits by constructing gated housing complexes, combined with a tendency among those who have the means to move to newly built housing behind gates. The long period of developer-friendly policies and governmental support of purchasers of new construction, have resulted in increased popularity of gated communities in Poland and their spread to many Polish cities.     

From picket fences to iron gates: suburbanization and gated communities in Phoenix,Las Vegas and Seattle

Suburbanization has been a prominent urban process in the United States since the World War II. It has transformed American cities in profound ways in every single aspect of urban development; from population and wealth distributions, through political organization and affiliations, to the built environment. This paper investigates the link between gated communities and the process of suburbanization in the context of socio-economic inequality. It has been shown time and again in the scholarly literature on suburbanization, that suburban neighborhoods in American cities have been traditionally more affluent and less diverse than central cities. The research on gated communities in the US also shows that they are, on average, more affluent compared to other communities in terms of family income and housing values. Are gated communities then simply a new form of suburban communities? Is the gated community in fact a suburban community with the added element of security features? The paper investigates these questions based on segregation and spatial analyses. The research contributes to the long line of studies on suburbanization, gating and the larger issues of urban inequality.     

Emerging trends in state regulation of private communities in the U.S.

Common interest housing (CIDs), which includes nearly all gated communities as well as non-gated but privately governed neighbourhoods, has become the predominant form of new housing construction in America. Optimistic early assessments that CIDs would prove to be more efficient alternative to municipalities are confronted by the fact of high levels of conflict and litigation, which are proving costly to residents as well as local governments. These conflicts are often highly publicized in the press, leading to concerns in the real estate industry that the demand for such housing could be jeopardized. The conflicts arise from having unpaid, untrained volunteer directors carrying out what were once municipal government functions, and concern financial issues as well as alleged abuses of power by association boards. In response to some of these concerns, across the nation, small but vocal ant-HOA owners groups are organizing, using the internet as their medium and gaining attention from the press. A consensus is emerging that the law governing private communities needs major changes, and different approaches are proposed or being implemented in several states. This paper examines these emerging regulatory trends and offers an assessment of their prospects.     

Gated communities in England: historical perspectives and current developments

It is important to analyse the growth of gated communities and the drivers for their supply and demand, within the context specific to each country’s history. This article uses findings from recent studies of gated communities in England, together with historical material, to explore their typology. It considers the changing social, economic and political conditions which may lead to the emergence of defended collective housing, together with the history of property relations and the concept of public/private land within the English context.     

After the consent: Re-imagining participatory land governance in Massingir,Mozambique

Massingir district is located in southern Mozambique, bordering South Africa. From the mid-2000s onwards, foreign private and domestic investments in the district have been on the rise in the agribusiness, tourism, and conservation sectors. This has resulted in events that scholars and activists have come to describe as land, water, and green grabs. The on-going discussions have urged the government to fully implement the policy and legal frameworks that oblige investors to undertake community consultations based on the principle of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and to safeguard the communities’ land right acquisition. However, little has been clarified about how the consulted communities actually have experienced the consequences of their consent after they agreed to resettle or to concede parts of their communally managed land to investors. This article elaborates on a case study of a community resettled from the Limpopo National Park in Massingir and the neighboring community, which, after struggling to secure land and to improve their livelihood, began to reflect on their initial consent, interact with various actors, and craft strategies for expressing dissent and re-negotiating the deal they had struck. The article argues that the current emphasis on consultation for the purposes of building consent overlooks the importance of paying systemic attention to these strategies that are emerging from the community’s everyday experiences with the consequences of their act of giving consent. Inclusive land governance entails an institutional mechanism that closely responds to people’s experiences with policy practices.     

Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: Neoliberalism,centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making

In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.     

A multi-disciplinary framework for the study of private housing schemes: integrating anthropological,psychological and political levels of theory and analysis

This paper examines the theories and methods involved in the study of the impact of private governance on residents in two distinct kinds of middle class housing schemes: gated community residents in New York and Texas living in single family attached and detached houses, and cooperative apartment dwellers in New York City. The studies employed a range of methodologies drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and political science. An attempt was made to understand residents lived experiences through a number of disciplinary lenses: theories of community and culture; theories of rationalization and psychological resistance, and theories of moral minimalism and representation. Each of these disciplinary layers added to the analysis, while at the same time, creating epistemological disjunctures and concerns that had to be addressed by the research team on an ongoing basis. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the benefits of this approach in terms of the production of new knowledge about private governance, while offering cautionary comments about undertaking interdisciplinary projects of this nature.     

Gated communities: From “Self-Sufficient Towns” to “Active Urban Agents”

The growing research on gated communities has largely regarded them as isolated and isolating places, rather than considering residents’ relations with other spaces and communities. This paper seeks to examine these external contacts through exploring the ways in which gated communities establish relations with local political actors. This is done through an examination of two gated communities in Gokturk and Omerli, Istanbul, and an analysis of the differences between them. On the basis of semi-structured in-depth interviews with residents and locals, the paper demonstrates how gated communities engage with the outside world in contrasting ways. By focusing on the conflict between Islamist and secular people, the paper also argues that gated communities are active urban agents, establishing interdependent relations with local political actors which can change urban space and politics.     

Private agri-food governance and greenhouse gas abatement: Constructing a corporate carbon economy

Private sector actors are playing an increasingly significant role in the definition and governance of ‘sustainable’ agri-food practices. Yet, to date little attention has been paid by social scientists to how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are addressed as part of private agri-food governance arrangements. This paper examines how private actors within agri-food supply chains respond to emerging pressure for measures to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Drawing upon the Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality literature, we introduce the notion of the corporate carbon economy to conceptualise the practical techniques that enable private agri-food actors to make GHG emissions thinkable and governable in the context of existing market, regulatory, and supply chain pressures. Using a case study of the Australian dairy industry, we argue that private agri-food actors utilise a range of techniques that enable them to respond to existing government environmental regulations, balance current market pressures with future supply chain requirements, and demonstrate improved eco-efficiency along food supply chains. These techniques – which include environmental self-assessment instruments, tools for measuring GHG emissions, and sustainability reporting – have little direct relevance to the ‘international climate regime’ of carbon trading, and carbon markets more broadly, yet individually and in combination they are crucial in enacting an alternative regime of GHG governance. In concluding, we contend that the growing use of sustainability metrics by international food companies is likely to have the most powerful implications for GHG governance in the agri-food sector, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how future action on climate change is rendered thinkable and practicable.     

Size does matter: City scale and the asymmetries of climate change adaptation in three coastal towns

Globally, it is smaller urban settlements that are growing most rapidly, are most constrained in terms of adaptive capacity but increasingly looked to for delivering local urban resilience. Data from three smaller coastal cities and their wider regional governance systems in Florida, US; West Sussex, UK and São Paulo, Brazil are used to compare the influence of scale and sector on city adaptive capacity. These tensions are described through the lens of the Adaptive Capacity Index (ACI) approach. The ACI is built from structuration theory and presents an alternative to social-ecological systems framing of analysis on adaptation. Structuration articulates the interaction of agency and structure and the intervening role played by institutions on information flow, in shaping adaptive capacity and outcomes. The ACI approach reveals inequalities in adaptive capacity to be greater across scale than across government, private and civil society sector capacity in each study area. This has implications for adaptation research both by reinforcing the importance of scale and demonstrating the utility of structuration theory as a framework for understanding the social dynamics underpinning adaptive capacity; and policy relevance, in particular considering the redistribution of decision-making power across scale and/or compensatory mechanisms, especially for lower scale actors, who increasingly carry the costs for enacting resilience planning in cities.     

Privatization of tubewells in North China: Determinants and impacts on irrigated area, productivity and the water table

Despite the rise in importance of the private sector in the expansion of the use of groundwater in China and the potential implications this might have for production and poverty, little has been written about the effect of these phenomena on northern China’s economy. In examining determinants of tubewell privatization and its impact on producers in northern China, data were collected using a community leader survey, carried out in 448 villages in six provinces in northern China. The results show that since 1990 collective ownership of tubewells has largely been replaced by private ownership. Increasing water scarcity, government grants and bank loans for tubewell investment and the declining investment capacity of China’s local communities have led to the observed change in tubewell ownership patterns. By far, the most important positive effect on income appears to be due to the expansion of newly irrigated area that has been fueled by the rise of private tubewells. Many newly private tubewells also have begun to replace irrigation from surface water sources. While helping increase income and productivity, the rise of private tubewells also has contributed to the fall in groundwater levels.

Environmental policy reform on north-eastern Brazil’s agricultural frontier

The expansion of modern agriculture in developing countries presents numerous challenges for environmental policy makers. Environmental policies for agriculture in north-eastern Brazil’s soybean belt are analyzed, with emphasis on the role of a non-state actor in leading policy reforms. An organization representing large farmers is leading policy reforms to reduce the environmental impacts of modern agriculture. By contrast, state agencies are relatively weak and ineffective. The analysis situates this question conceptually in literatures stressing the political and structural causes of corporate environmentalism and literatures explaining the increasingly strong role of non-state actors in environmental governance. The case study focuses on the content of reforms, reasons why the non-state actor is so prominent, and the implications of policy reforms. State agencies face major challenges in environment-agriculture policy debates in places where environmental subsidies are unlikely, environmental information is poor, and organized private interests are influential.     

State,capital and spaceships: A terrestrial geography of space tourism

Over the past decade, there has been a significant structural and geographical change in space travel. Following policy, budgetary and regulatory changes in the United States, space travel may now be conducted by private companies. This privatization has also led to some geographical competition and shifts between states within the US. In this paper, I respond to MacDonald’s (2007) call for more critical geographies of outer space activity. Building from his suggestion that we look more closely at the ways in which outer space activity is constituted by “numerous familiar operations” with respect to the practices of international relations and war and to the “basic infrastructural maintenance of the state and the lives of its citizenry”, this paper explores why the US Government has allowed for private space travel and why this privatization drove some states in the US to invest heavily in such a nascent industry sector. It argues that federal and state governments both saw private space travel as a means to fulfill their “basic infrastructural maintenance” with regard to economic expansion, development and competitiveness. The paper analyses these processes through the development of space tourism. In doing so, it provides more detail and geographical context to Dickens and Ormrod’s (2007) overview of the connections between outer space and the circuits of capital. It also demonstrates the many familiar political-economic processes involved in the privatization of space travel and, as such, the possibilities for further critical geographies of space activity.     

The origins and use of theory in urban geography: Household mobility and filtering theory

The paper looks in detail at one particular interpenetration of academic theory and state policy making — filtering theory in urban geography. While household mobility and turnover are important processes in the housing system, they are extended in filtering theory to form a universal explanatory model embracing the entire housing system. In this model idealised concepts of the operation of the housing market—valid only under conditions that do not occur in practice — are used to legitimate a laissez-faire natural-market view of how the housing system should operate. Translated into government policy, used to justify the dominant private interests in housing, and supported by academic explanation, the theory then comes to legitimate the persistence of gross inequalities in housing provision and to maintain the allocation of resources away from those most in need. This paper reviews this use of filtering theory both in Britain and the United States, and makes a variety of empirical and theoretical criticism of its validity.     

Brutal presence or convenient absence: The role of the state in the politics of flooding in informal Accra,Ghana

This paper argues that human vulnerability to flood hazards in urban slums in developing countries is greatly affected by the positioning and activities of their city governments. As a result, the paper explores the central role of city authorities in the production of flood vulnerability in selected informal settlements in Accra, Ghana. Using a case study research design, the study draws on multiple qualitative methods to gather evidence including: document review, focus group discussions, flood victims’ interviews, institutional consultation and field observation. The paper reveals two main positions of state and city authorities in Accra’s perennial floods: first, being present and complicit in informal urbanization through their involvement in the politics of land management in flood prone zones; and second, being absent through their inaction in informal growth in flood-risk areas. To each of these positions of the urban state, there are emerging responses from residents and other non-state actors operating within and outside these informal communities. The paper proposes a re-examination of the current structure and processes of urban governance, state-community engagements and urban citizenship in informal communities.     

An institutional analysis of the evolution of inland waterway transport and inland ports on the Pearl River

Inland waterway transport (IWT) is the most appropriate means of transportation in the pursuit of a sustainable development strategy. The development of IWT varies per region. Public entities and institutions play an important role in the development of IWT. This paper analyses the development of IWT on the Pearl River from an institutional perspective. Chinese national fiscal reforms, land use reforms and the transfer of power from the central government to local governments impact the governance of IWT. The paper demonstrates that the privatization of inland ports was triggered by the mismatch between the objectives of IWT operators and either public objectives or market demand. This process unfolded while top-level governors did not aim for privatization. The paper shows how formal institutional changes of IWT on the Pearl River are both the result of deliberate design and a path creation in the transformation from the Chinese planned economy to the Chinese market economy. It also shows how institutional changes resulted in a dual development path (i.e. a rapid development of inland terminals but underdevelopment of inland waterways) of IWT in the Pearl River. Policy recommendations are provided based on the research findings with specific attention to the factors hindering IWT development on the Pearl River at the level of the waterway infrastructure and inland ports.     

Gated minds and gated lives as worlds of exclusion and fear

Three interrelated concepts about the “gatedness of life” are addressed in this essay: gated communities, gated lives, and gated minds. All are important components in understanding the places where gated communities are located within a city as well as those who live in them. Mapping these concepts is a further theme discussed.     

New populations in the British city centre: Evidence of social change from the census and household surveys

Encouraged by government policies to promote city centre living and to increase residential land use on brownfield sites, there has been considerable repopulation of the city centre. Through detailed small-area census analysis of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea, supplemented by household surveys and key informant interviews, the research points to a range of population characteristics and changes occurring in the British city centre. Certain characteristics such as a high proportion of lone person households, fewer children and low car ownership remain fairly consistent. However, substantial population expansion affirms that a large part of the population is “new”. Between 1991 and 2001, men came to outnumber women, and each of the city centres saw a relative expansion of its young adult population. The new residents have a higher appreciation than longer term residents of proximity to work and leisure facilities, and of the stylishness of city centre living. Most of the new residents rent their accommodation, generally in flats, and the predominance of renting is associated with a transient attitude to city centre residence among the new population. Socio-economic evidence indicates a striking rise in social status or gentrification in all the city centres investigated, especially where high status private housing developments encourage the trend. With policies promoting residential development, the city centre is becoming increasingly socially exclusive.