Description
Scholars of urban and regional planning examine the development and social impact of gated communities, which are seeping from the super-wealthy to the middle class and are even being aped in modest-income neighborhoods. They look at lifestyle communities such as retirement communities and suburban new towns, prestige communities for the rich and pretentious, and security zones in which people hide behind fortifications. They see the phenomenon as fragmenting society and contributing nothing to solving the problems they are responding to. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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"Gated communities are a new ""hot button"" in many North American cities. From Boston to Los Angeles and from Miami to Toronto citizens are taking sides in the debate over whether any neighborhood should be walled and gated, preventing intrusion or inspection by outsiders. This debate has intensified since the hard cover edition of this book was published in 1997. Since then the number of gated communities has risen dramatically. In fact, new homes in over 40 percent of planned developments are gated n the West, the South, and southeastern parts of the United States. Opposition to this phenomenon is growing too. In the small and relatively homogenous town of Worcester, Massachusetts, a band of college students from Brown University and the University of Chicago picketed the Wexford Village in November of 1998 waving placards that read ""Gates Divide."" These students are symbolic of a much larger wave of citizens asking questions about the need for and the social values of gates that divide one portion of a community from another."
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