Prisoners By Choice

“mrisoners by choice

tasn’t the fall of the Berlin tall supposed to set the world free and end history? fn the 20 years sinceI communities worldwide have voluntarily retreated behind walls and security cameras.”

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GATED

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COMMUNITIES AND DOMESTICATED CELLS

Prisoners by choice

Wasn’t the fall of the Berlin Wall supposed to set the world free and end history? In the 20 years since, communities worldwide have voluntarily retreated behind walls and security cameras

by Rowland Atkinson Guerline Dieu and her five children were murdered by Dieu’s husband in a gated community in North Naples, Collier County, Florida, in September 2009. The case highlighted the truth of our new residential security landscape, which is that gates and walls will never save us from the commonest sources of violence in our lives. Not long before Dieu’s murder, paramedics in South Carolina failed to save the life of a man who had had a heart attack, because an unmanned gate with a pin code entry blocked the ambulance for three minutes (1). The county administrator later pointed out there were 32 unmanned gates in his district alone. This led to heated debates about the need for emergency override systems at barriers intended to keep trouble, rather than help, out. Yet the love affair with living in such compounds is only just beginning.

We all thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of the Iron Curtain, would dismantle barriers, but 20 years later, there are new and more subtle walls and social dividers around many neighbourhoods globally. Not just the big ones – Belfast’s “peace walls” and the new US-Mexico and Israel-West Bank divisions – but all the residential gated development, in places often with low crime rates and significant local affluence. These micro fortifications now accommodate around four million US households and a thousand such developments are scattered across England (2).

Some commentators argue that gating has become a mark of social distinction, emblematic of a search for privacy and control less evident in the public domains.

Residents and communities seem to seek secession from political and social interference, often generating services for residents that compete with or substitute for those provided by the local state. This challenges collective provision of key services, like refuse collection and roads, but also appears to engender opposition to civic provision. This has been observed recently by census enumerators in Australia, the UK and US, who now realise how barriers against access make the state myopic in its attempt to profile its population (3). Concern about the frequent absence of young, male and deprived households has been supplanted by worries that the affluent are fading from public view, and challenging collective provision – if we provide for ourselves why should we be taxed twice?

Social and economic changes have undergirded these changes and generated fearful, needy citizens. Fearful because national political obsessions with terrorism, drugs, crime and economic repairs suggest deleterious impacts on local and global

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environments. Needy because people are locked into a socially atomised world that makes them liable for their own health, safety and economic wellbeing. We are now free to choose these things, as though anyone would prefer to do without such insurances, while gross inequalities generate uneven access to their provision. These macro-social forces have made sanctuary more attractive since it appears to offer a physical bulwark against the anxiety of contemporary life. Yet gates and walls will provide brief respite.

In our affluent societies, the ascription of disorder outside the home requires us to launch ourselves into sites of incalculable risk, unpredictable social encounter and a degraded public realm that worries or depresses us. As J K Galbraith (4) noted many years ago, our private wealth is linked to a diminution of collective provision so that public squalor must be traversed outside the comfortable private home. We find ourselves moving between micro-bordered worlds, from one safe zone to another; what the Dutch theorist Lieven de Cauter (5) calls a “capsular civilisation�. In the US, armed householders live in fortified homes, inside gated communities within cities aggressively patrolled by militarised police forces; nests of domesticity are nested within defensive arrangements, up to and including the boundary policing of the nation-state. A fear of personal harm and the pursuit of status have created a built environment in a generalised state of alarm, further feeding the rationale by which such citadel spaces were engineered and generating a sense of in-group affluence and out-group danger.

Crisis of legitimacy An examination of the relative featurelessness of political positions across many European states acts as a counterpoint to the optimism of those wall-free moments, 20 years ago. Political life offers only a permanent crisis of legitimacy amid the complex and extensive social and spatial polarisation of urban life. It is difficult to see how greater economic security is to be assured, and metaphysical anxiety reduced, without feeding further the exploitation on other economies and vulnerable groups.

Aspirations for relative equality, social justice and participation have been undermined by a sense of the immediacy and finality of our lives, a need to provide security and, not unlike the robber barons of the corporate world, a desire to take what we can and lock ourselves away from the scrutiny of our riches.

Instead of the realisation that God is dead feeding a search for social justice in this world, the unspoken aspirations of a majority in western societies are for personalised, maximal returns (in life, leisure, education, holidays, homes and other status goods).

The current economic crisis won’t be powerful enough to stall a belief in the pursuit of personal wealth through the housing market. Exhausted, dual-earning and commuting couples commit ever more to their housing costs in the pursuit of a perpetually

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deferred happiness, and we have neither the money nor the energy to get out of our domestic and neighbourhood fortresses.

Where is the alternative vision for more equitable, pro-social, joyful urban experiences? Such dividends will only come through reducing the inequality exclusion felt by so many but, as Herbert Gans said about desegregating American cities in the 1960s (6), it seems unfeasible that popular politics will assist an affluent majority to vote for what it will see as its own impoverishment.

Today’s affluence is based on leveraged borrowing, fuelling dramatic increases in the cost of core goods like housing, so that many affluent households also feel close to the wire; school fees, credit cards and mortgages at maximum, the essential holidays and cars all further strains on the household purse. The time-binds required to support this affluence are now such that many are running to stand still. After more than a decade of England’s urban renaissance programme, we are left with few places worth travelling to that might sustain a more nourished, spiritual or human sense of self in our daily urban lives.

We are scared of the wrong things. We fear violence at the hands of strangers but are more likely to be attacked by partners; we are alerted to terrorists without a history or acknowledgment of geo-political injustice; we focus on the rare and the cruel without understanding social complexity or its context. The world outside the front door appears as a random, vicious trap. The walling, gating and locking-down of the domestic sphere is the ultimate endpoint of this fear, but we also need to recognise the logic by which political and corporate life reaps dividends.

Developers have an interest in highlighting the communality of life in gated zones while drawing attention to the risks of living outside them. These fears aren’t without foundation, yet it is social disparities under neoliberalism that have generated these increased risks of personal harm at the hands of the excluded while offering market opportunities for private security products. And politicians seek political capital by selling themselves as saviours from terror, economic variability, immigration, drugs, crime and the blowback of ecological catastrophe.

We are faced with an understanding of our lives as a project of the self – a search for riskless spaces, matchless returns and diminished social contact as badges of distinction. Under these conditions we are forced to accept the logic of operating around an atavistic image of society in which primal needs for security and sustenance are to the fore. It is unsurprising that those with the means now shun the apparent jungle rules outside our front doors and find comfort in a world mediated and softened by the distractions and technologies inside.

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