Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow

Gated Communities:
Building Social Division or Safer Communities?

18th and 19th September 2003

Gated communities in Mexico City

Dr Angela Giglia,
Department of Anthropology,
Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana,
Mexico City
[email protected]

Based on a long term field investigation, the paper addresses the issue
of gated communities in Mexico City as a specific form of the crisis of
public space and urban order in a stratified society. By comparing five
forms of walled neighbourhoods, the paper shows their common
characteristics in spite of their morphologic differences. Living in
segregated residential spaces in Mexico City is a complex social process
which is not only the result of the fear of crime but also a way to escape
from urban disorder, to establish islands of social homogeneity and to
experiment new forms of local government.
 2

Forms of enclosure and representations of unsafety

It is well known that in big cities, the current concern about security and
maintenance of social order express themselves through social and
spatial segregation processes. Examples of this phenomenon are the so-
called closed spaces which can be residential, commercial or dedicated
to the supply of services. These enclosures are under surveillance, and
they aspire to be impenetrable for strangers and undesirable people.
From their different access devices to their regulations, which define
what can or cannot be done inside them, these spaces respond to a
specific logic of control that does not always fit with observance to
individual rights, such as the right to free transit or movement, or the
right to privacy.
I wish to expound here some considerations about the urban experience
of people who live in residential areas with different types of enclosure
in Mexico City, and their representations concerning urban security and
insecurity as well as urban order. These ideas stem from an
ethnographic comparison between five different types of walled
neighbourhoods, which I have been able to undertake during the last
three years employing such techniques as participant observation and
open interviews, both personally and as the adviser of some students1.
The nieghbourhoods studied are a middle-low class residential
development called Villa Panamericana; a middle class residential
development called Villa Olmpica; a middle-high class horizontal
condominium in Camino a Santa Teresa Street, a high-class walled

1
Cf. Miriam Sosa, Habitar en calles cerradas en el caso de Coapa, Tesis
de Maestra, FLACSO, Costa Rica, 2002, as well as Roco Echevarra, La
Villa Panamericana, Trabajo terminal de licenciatura en antropologa
social, julio 2003.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 3
neighbourhood in the Ajuscos forest named Tlalpuente, and two
confined middle-class blocks in Coapas zone2.

Villa Panamericana (Sections 1, 2 and 3).

Villa Panamericana has a surface area of about 2 square kilometers. It

was named Panamericana because the 1975 Panamerican Games took
place there. This residential development is located between the Anillo
Perifrico Sur, the Imn Avenue, Cfiro Street, Aponecas Street, and
Adolfo Ruiz Cortnez Boulevard. It is a welfare housing complex built by
INFONAVIT from 1972 to 1985, and is presently one of the biggest
residential developments in the city, with a population of 15,000
inhabitants. Many of the buildings are enclosed with either iron bars or
stone walls, vegetation or brick fences. In some cases, the iron bars
have an entrance door which seldom works or which is usually kept
open. There are some frequently tidy shared areas inside the
neighbourhood that contain some infrastructural elements and repairs
made by the inhabitants themselves; however, there are also some
neglected spaces, full of rubbish and covered with graffiti.
This neighbourhood is considered by its residents themselves as an
unsafe place, because of the impossibility of keeping drug addicts and
thieves under control. There is an obvious and recurring presence of
young homeless beggars who use to sleep in the gardens.

2
This paper draws on some empirical work already published. See Giglia
2000, 2002, 2003.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 4
Villa Olmpica

Villa Olmpica was built as a residential unit for the athletes who came
for the 1968 Olympic Games. It is located on Insurgentes Avenue, close
to its crossroads with Anillo Perifrico, in a very strategic area in the
southern part of the city. It comprises nine hundred and four
apartments, most of them the same size (with three bedrooms, a living-
room and a service area), distributed among twenty nine ten-story
buildings. The first residents of this development were markedly
homogeneous in socioeconomic terms, with high schooling family chiefs
(either professional or semi-professional), whose wives used to work
outside the house instead of being just housewives (Gonzlez Reyes
1991: 61 ss.). There have been some changes in this original social
composition; however, there is still a strong presence of middle-class
intellectuals, some of them from abroad, since Villa Olmpica has been a
shelter for exiled people from South America and, more recently, for
families coming from Asia and Eastern Europe.
The inner characteristics of the apartments, their display and size, the
plentiful parking places and the green areas still make of Villa Olmpica a
high-quality place, both in functional as in urban terms. The
neighbourhood is completely walled and has a single entrance which is
controlled by guards 24 hours a day.

Camino a Santa Teresa Horizontal Condominium

This walled neigbourhood was built by a private construction company

during the 1970s. It comprises twenty two equal houses, each of which
has a surface area of about 200 square meters and five bedrooms. At
the beginning, this development was inhabited by middle-class well-off
young families with small children. It was surrounded by a forest and

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 5
there was nothing else in the surrounding area. Nowadays, a first
generation of children has started leaving the neighborhood and the first
residents are already elderly people.
The condominium, located beside the Tlalpan forest in a quiet, elegant
zone, is not far away from Villa Olmpica. It is not guarded by sentries,
except for a man who works both as a doorkeeper and as a caretaker
for the shared areas. The residential space is described by the
inhabitants as very quiet and safe. However, both the lack of security of
the city which is described almost as a monster, and the fear of going
out of home, are subjects which appear here more often than in the rest
of the analysed neighbourhoods. This phenomenon could be the result
of the ageing of the interviewed people and of their relatively high
socioeconomic level.

Tlalpuente

This settlement is situated alongside the Ajuscos forest, close to the old
main road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca. It comprises a hundred and
sixty hectares. The residents of San Andrs, a village on the lower
slopes of Ajusco, used to administer the area according to the usages
and customs regime, specifically by means of agreements between
some families, which divided the area among themselves and used the
land to produce, above all, oak charcoal. Later, a group of middle-high
class people who had experience in urban developments became
interested in the zone, and decided to build an ecological settlement.
San Andrs inhabitants started selling their plots to this people, who
divided the land into plots of five to ten thousand square meters, and
summoned their friends with the hope of creating a unique settlement in
the forest, in close contact with nature -almost a flight away from the

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 6
city but not far away from it. The first houses were small weekend
cabins. During the 1980s, under the threat of an evacuation of the zone
due to an important invasion of lands, Tlalpuentes residents organized
themselves into a civil association and adopted a series of rules to
constitute the first special zone of controlled development (ZEDEC) in
the countryside. According to ZEDECs regulations, the plots where
houses could be built should be very spacious; the building should not
exceed 5% of the whole surface area of the plot (450 square meters for
a plot of 6,000 square meters). The principles which apply to this place
are the care of the forest and the maintenance of a piece of nature
inside the city. The population density amounts to eight inhabitants per
hectare, one of the lowest in the metropolitan area: it is necessary to
have a great love for the forest, silence and nature if one wants to live
in Tlalpuente. Few people can put up with the isolation in the
countryside. The area is almost completely fenced off, but there is still a
part of the perimeter for which there have not been as yet enough
resources to put the mesh. There are guards and automatic barriers that
can be lift up by means of a magnetic card owned by all the residents.

Closed streets in Coapa

These are two closed neighbourhoods in the Coapa zone, in Tlalpan,

where, unlike the confinements described so far, the closure is not a
preexistent morphological element, but the result of a mobilization
process of the neighbours aimed at closing streets which were originally
open.
The empirical research dealt with two big blocks (numbers Four and
Five), respectively situated on Acoxpa Road (between Garita and
Hacienda Avenues) and on Acoxpa and La Garita Avenue and Tenorios

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 7
Road3. Originally, those areas were meant to be a part of Villa Coapa,
a settlement built for the 1968 Olympic Games to provide
accommodation for journalists and other people involved in the Olympic
Games. The two big blocks are nowadays inhabited by more than five
thousand people who belong to middle or middle-low class families and
work as public sector employees, shopkeepers, professionals and small
businessmen (Soza 2001: 23). During the 1970s, living there meant for
the residents that they had been able to get a better place to live,
because of the size of the houses (the plots are relatively big) and the
advantages of the location (quite close to the Perifrico, the most
important ring road in Mexico City). From the residents point of view,
living there is a finishing line, the achievement of a better status, that of
a single private home located in a residential area which occupies a
strategic position in the South of the city (Gottfried 2002). The first
attempts to close the streets go back to some fifteen years ago, when
people started placing flowerpots and window boxes to protect

3
The closing of streets in Coapa is a broad phenomenon in the zone, as
can be seen all along Acoxpa Avenue, Canal de Miramontes, the Hueso
Road and Las Bombas Road: from these wide streets one can see all the
perpendicular alleys closed by automatic barriers, fences or sentry
boxes guarded by policemen. It should be noted that in the Gua Roji,
the official map of Mexico City, those dead-end streets are still marked
as open streets. This lack of correspondence can cause some problems
to the drivers who try to circulate along them without permission. There
are different types of closure, among which we can find the closure with
a sentry box, an automatic barrier and a guard; the closure with a
sentry box, a gateway and a guard; the closure with a sentry box, an
automatic barrier, a gateway and a guard; the closure with a sentry box
and a guard; the closure with gateways made of iron bars, to all of
which can be added window boxes and posts. According to the function
of the closure in connection with the traffic control, we can distinguish at
least four types of closure: an entrance to come in and out, only as a
way out, only as a way in, and neither as a way neither in nor out. This
last type is found in the blocked streets.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 8
themselves from the setting-up of shops in the surrounding area,
something which would necessarily mean the arrival of public transport.
The aim was to reduce the uncontrollable traffic of cars and buses in the
inner streets in order to guarantee the tranquility of the area and its
residential nature, preventing the entrance of strange people, and
specially of public transport. Later on, closing the streets became a need
to confront theft and armed robbery in homes, as well as the stealing of
cars and of parts of cars. In short, the closing of streets becomes an
increasingly effective remedy as disorder and the uncontrolled
occupation of the public space rise around the two blocks, and as the
appraisal of the insecurity of the zone becomes increasingly sharp. The
setting up of devices to drastically and definitely close the streets the
sentry boxes, the automatic barriers, the guards or the fixed fences-
goes back to the last years. From the perspective of the internal
dynamics among the residents, the closure of the streets is the result of
a participation process which has not been simple, a process marked by
recurrent failures and sporadic moments of collective mobilization. The
decision to close the streets was made up and carried out by a small
number of neighbours, if we compare it with the total amount of
inhabitants. However, those who did not accept the procedure did
formally agree with it.4
The closure of the space leads to an emulation process among the
neighbours, by means of which they strive to improve the symbols of

4
There are neighbours who benefit from the results of the closure -i.e.,
the decrease of the traffic and of the insecurity - but who do not pay for
the security services because they do not formally agree with the
closure of the neighbourhood, so it is impossible to force them to pay
their fee. It is easy to understand that this creates a serious problem for
the relationships among neighbours and for the dynamics of their
participation.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 9
their social position, make their houses more beautiful or buy a new car.
This process cannot be explained only by the closure as a warranty of
increased security, because the residents know that the closure does not
automatically make them free from robbery and theft. They even know
that if there is a robbery inside the neighborhood, the company in
charge of the surveillance will not be held responsible, since the thieves
go beyond any kind of security. In short, the search for security is not
the only value associated with living in a walled neighbourhood. But the
fact that it is closed gives the space a higher symbolic value, which
leads to a process of imaginary social ascent.

Different representations of insecurity, yet similar

representations of the difference inside/outside as well as of the
relationships with the rest of the city

If we ask ourselves what does closed spaces mean, and see how the
closure has an effect in the identification of the inhabitants with the
place, we realize that there is a tendency to consider the enclosure as a
fact, as something that is not worth discussing. Taking the closure for
granted is what allows the inhabitants to establish the difference with
the outside and to structure a discourse about the identity of the
inside. The physical barrier helps to conceive of the social boundaries.
The inside is thought of as something different, a separate world, with
its own style and different rules. In Villa Olmpicas case, the
neighbourhood is defined as a private space in which a specific
sociability makes it possible for different individuals (youngsters, elderly
people, children, foreigners, etc.) to co-exist respectfully. In Tlalpuentes
case, the residents emphasize their shared love for the forest and
nature, and their often problematic relationships with the social

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 10
environment and with the authorities, both of which pose a threat to the
forest.
The accounts of the inhabitants emphasize above all how special their
neighbourhood is, its difference from the rest of the city. The closed
neighbourhoods have been chosen as a place to live because of their
non - urban nature, because they can be imagined as villages or
small towns, places where country ways and small-town social
relationships still show themselves, where everybody knows and
respects each other, but, at the same time, places that have some
cosmopolitan traits which allow the foreigner to feel at home. In any
case, these are valuable places because they are different from the rest
of the city, where streets are full of heterogeneity, huge inequalities,
unexpected events, distrust, violence and risks of all kinds. Even in the
Villa Panamericana, where some drug addicts and drunkards use to stay
in the common areas, some residents point out that they are people
who belong to that place and that, therefore, they are not strangers and
do not pose any threat nor any real disadvantage, besides their
deplorable look. In short, they are the known drunkards and drug
addicts of the neighbourhood.
It should not be surprising that in Villa Panamericana, where the closure
is less effective because there are no guards, nor automatic barriers at
the entrance, the difference inside/outside is less categorical, more free-
flowing, and the inhabitants do not avoid saying that they consider that
the place is unsafe, that it can be penetrated by the undesirable which
dwells in the outside. However, the element they emphasize in order to
build a symbolic difference with the outside is the notion of
peacefulness, of living in a more quiet place than the surroundings.
Once it is taken for granted that the inside is safer than the outside, it
is possible to display different behaviours, such as letting the children
play among the buildings without checking that they are really inside the

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 11
neighbourhood, or leaving the windows and the front door half-open.
These behaviours set up in the inside an atmosphere of greater
confidence and relaxation. None of these spaces, of course, is exempted
from robbery, even violent robbery, but the idea that the inside is
safer, tends to be a persistent one, confirmed by the existence of a
physical barrier.
Nevertheless, if we take a closer look at the way the closure really
works, we will notice that it is never a hundred per cent effective. What
the security devices do achieve is to reduce the probability that
undesirable individuals come into the neighbourhood. It is worth
noting that the surveillance devices which encompass automatic barriers
and policemen at the entrance are a hundred percent effective only in
controlling the entrance of vehicles to the neighbourhoods, but they do
not carry out at all a systematic control of the pedestrians who come
into the neighbourhood. This takes us back to the idea of the visitor
who comes from the city (therefore, of the inhabitant of the city) as
someone equipped with a car, whereas the simple passer-by is a sort of
entity that does not deserve any attention, whose identity is not worth
recording.
If we ask if these forms of safe inhabitance achieve their main explicit
objective safety-, we have to come to the conclusion that, seen from
outside, this kind of neighbourhoods might seem impenetrable, but if we
take a closer look at them, they turn out to be very porous places.
Besides, the specific operation of the surveillance devices outlines a
critical subject: how the image of the undesirable individual, of the
person that should not come in, is built and reproduced, and how this
representation acts on the behaviour of the persons who are in charge
of the security. Evidently, the assessment of the people who are not
allowed to come in depends on cultural viewpoints and stereotypes. A

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 12
forty year-old white man will be allowed in, but a young dark man
carrying a student rucksack will surely be stopped and questioned.
The distrust towards that which comes from the outside and the attempt
to build a separate world with its own rules, are some of the most
relevant traits of the walled neighbourhoods. The city is a menacing
chaos in face of which the separatist temptations are rather strong:
nobody can come in, this is private property5.
Another element which should be emphasized is that, in Mexico Citys
case, the closure is not only the result of the lack of security, but it is
also associated with wider phenomena that affect the public space,
particularly the difficulty to control and regulate the inappropriate, illegal
and untimely forms of use of the streets (Duhau and Giglia 2001). The
proliferation of these forms of unruly use of the streets which are
connected to the authorities by means of corruption practices e.g.,
restaurants which stretch out to the pavement, discos that do not
observe safety measures, repair shops, buses, travelling shopkeepers,
etc.- pushes the middle classes into retreat from the public space by
means of barriers and the privatization of pieces of land which would
otherwise be threatened by disorder and lack of regulation. Feeling safe
is represented as living in a place from where undesirable people are
excluded, and where it is possible to understand one another and share
with them (where the rest of the people are not strangers), while, at the
same time, one takes distance from what is outside. In this sense,
seeking separation from the outside, aims at establishing in the

5
These tendencies are reinforced by the attitude of local authorities,
who do not want to be held responsible for the upkeep and the
management of the inner space defined by the confinement, nor for
the so-called condominal space, as defined by the condominium law
(Giglia 1998). We are not far from an image of the urban space as a re-
feudalized space, made up of fortified and self-governed citadels.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 13
inside a level of security which is not only understood as the
elimination of crime inside the neighbourhood, but also as the
elimination of any kind of undesirable usage of the common space
around the dwelling. This explains the almost massive spread of closed
streets, which do not manage to be much more safer against offence
and crime, but which are indeed much more quiet and peaceful, thanks
to the elimination of traffic and of the indiscriminate use of the
pavement by travelling shopkeepers and other kinds of workers who
operate in the street.
The enclosure is meant to mark the social differences, since the
exclusive use of certain spaces is what allows one to differ from the
other through a whole process of construction and fixing of ones own
identity and, at the same time, of defense of specific life-styles. When I
visit the shopping mall or the club or the gym or any other place of the
sort, I insert myself into spaces which have their own rules, I observe
those rules and I distinguish myself from those who remain outside. The
result is that each of these closed places tends to be extremely
predictable; I do not find there people who are completely unknown, but
people whose conduct can be very predictable just like mine.
Moreover, the very predictability of these places, the fact that I know
what I can and cannot find there, becomes one of its main appealing
qualities.
In the examined cases, the search for security is part of a more complex
socio-spatial process, which includes three strategies: the search for
security itself, the will of differing from the outside, and the aim (or
the illusion) to achieve internal homogeneity. All these strategies work
together, and their effect is to reinforce one another. Knowing that one
is among people of the same socio-economic level or of the same life-
style (people like oneself) and feeling oneself separated from those
who belong to the outside, reinforces the feeling of safety.

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 14
The practice of urban behaviour, or civility, understood as a mixture of
acknowledgement and indifference, minimal civilized interaction among
individuals who do not know each other and will not meet again, based
on the assumption of the greatest possible heterogeneity in urban
encounters, becomes unnecessary in most of the closed spaces.
Paradoxically, the socio-spatial fragmentation, which characterizes many
big cities, is not accompanied by an increase in urban anonymity. On
the contrary, the places (Aug 1992) where one can meet ones own
peers people like me, and where one can confirm ones own social
membership through the mirror of the others. The fact that these spaces
are often far away from each other or segregated and surrounded by
spaces which could be described as nobodys land, does not deprive
them from their nature of places, in the sense that they are endowed
with a collective meaning. However, it does put them in a new urban
geography, amidst a different experience of the city6.
In spite of the strong temptations of residents towards self-governance,
which seem so prone to secession through such practices as closing
the streets, not letting the police in, or hiring the electricity and water
services thinking of themselves as clients, not as users of a public
service - it is worth noting that these places are not at all harmonic
communities where individuals dissolve into the group and shared
values are built in a ritual fashion. This is why I believe that the term
gated communities can lead to mistakes and misunderstandings. I
would rather call them collectivities, groups in which not everybody
shares the same perspectives, nor the same life-style, where internal

6
In the global city, the places are multiplied as the result of the
multiplication of the identity-formation (formacin) processes and of the
actions aimed at creating the spatial (espaciales) potentials which
Gropius would call spatial (espaciales) virtualities (?) for the creation of
identity (Amendola 2000, 59).

Angela Giglia, Gated communities in Mexico City

 15
conflicts do exist and are sometimes strong7, but that want (and can)
manage their own affairs, at least those which are related to the
management of the common areas, the selection of the new residents,
and the internal forms of life.
If, on the one side, closed neighbourhoods involve fragmentation and
socio-spatial division, on the other, they reproduce some kind of micro
public spheres inside them, where it is possible to make some shared
decisions and to come to some agreements. In some cases, it is the
very need to protect oneself against insecurity what drives the residents
of closed streets to cooperate with authorities in the carrying out of
programs aimed at preventing local offence.
Even when restricted to those internal affairs, self-governance is one of
the most important topics to study in these places: they are good
observatories to study the incipient growth of new forms of participation
under the rule of new principles.

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7
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