Low, S. M. 2003. The Edge and the Center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear. Pages 387-407 in S. M. Low and D. Lawrence-Zunigais, editors. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Blackwell Publishers, Malden. Publication

Across America, middle-class and upper-middle-class gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and residential segregation, exacerbating social cleavages that already exist. While historically secured and gated communities were built in the United States to protect estates and to contain the leisure world of retirees, these urban and suburban developments now target a much broader market, including families with children. This retreat to secured enclaves with walls, gates, and guards materially and symbolically contradicts American ethos and values, threatens public access to open space, and creates yet another barrier to social interaction, building of social networks, as well as increased tolerance of diverse cultural/ racial/social groups.

In this paper, I explore how the discourse of fear of violence and crime and the search for a secure community by those who live in gated communities in the United States legitimates and rationalizes class-based exclusion strategies and residential segregation. I examine whether residents of cities experiencing increasing cultural diversity are fleeing neighborhoods because they have experienced a "loss of place" and therefore feel unsafe and insecure. Some people are responding to this loss by choosing to buy into a defensive space, a walled and guarded community that they can call home.