Gated communities, time, space and society: a historical perspective

Abstract

This paper discusses the origins of the “gated communities” phenomenon, its evolution, and the contemporary enduring of its more distinctive pristine features. It is about how a specific and historically located socio-spatial form got to survive almost unchanged in its very symbolical core, and in its essential social and political background conditions, for more than two centuries in spite of all the obvious supervening changes. Our analysis is essentially based on the available international literature on the issue and on the direct observation of the phenomenon in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, which we have been studying in depth since the 1990s, and in other world cases we had the opportunity to confront empirically with.