Gated Communities There Are a

Gated Communities There are a host of different reasons that people live in gated communities, according to Setha Low, author of Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. The identification and explanation of these various reasons come as the result of extensive interviews with many people living in gated communities, in which decisions to move to and live in gated communities were explicitly explained to the author.

There are also reasons, however, that the author herself determines lie at the root of the desire to move to the secure isolationism of a gated community through conjecture, and while based on the interviews that she has conducted these latter reasons do not always match up directly with what the author gleans from interviews. Rather, they represent her own conjecture based on the collation of many interviews.

Essentially, the author argues, people who live in gated communities are often searching for a sense of stability in the neighborhood, and they expect the same dedication and community loyalty that they feel in themselves to be evinced by their neighbors. A gated community provides a solid geographical community with clearly defined boundaries, and this can enable feelings of stability and a cohesive neighborhood in a way that urban and suburban sprawl simply doesn't.

One of the people interviewed mentions the desire to get away from transient neighbors, and the author uses this as a jumping-off point to examine the deeper currents of community cohesiveness and general neighborliness, as well. She, along with a cultural anthropologist she interviews, believes that the ever-decreasing sense of community in this country is one of the primary drives for people to move to gated communities. The people themselves, however, generally note security as their primary reason fro moving to such communities.

Even the children that the author interviews in a cursory manner (against her research protocol, as she acknowledges, but it can be difficult to resist the demands of a nine-year-old niece) regard security and a fear of intruders as the primary reason fro living in a gated community; one boy even discusses the fact that the walls around his house are too low to be truly effective, and dreams of living in a place with much higher walls and a real guard with a gun at the entrance.

Contrary to the author's assertion that the people are looking for community, this seems to be a desire for isolation. It is, admittedly, a collective isolation, and the sense of community draws many people to gated communities, but a fear of the outside world is stronger in their consciousness. It is the sense of community, however, that appears most sharply in Russell Sharman's.