No refuge from
reality
Gated communities will not isolate
the rich from the chaos they have
created, either at home or abroad
guardian.co.uk
Gary Younge
Monday December 2, 2002
The Guardian
Felicia lives in a 120-home complex with a
private golf course, swimming pool and
clubhouse in San Antonio, Texas. This
vast suburban luxury is protected by a
six-foot-high wall and protected by an
electronic gate, video camera and a guard
with an intercom. Inside, she tells Setha
Low in her book, The Edge and the
Center, she feels safe. Outside there is
nothing but fear. "When I leave the area
entirely and go downtown I feel quite
threatened, just being out in normal urban
areas, unrestricted urban areas."
"All-pervasive fear of life outside the gates
is a frequent result of this type of
attachment," concludes Anna Minto, in
Building Balanced Communities, a report
published by the Royal Institute of
Chartered Surveyors last week. "Those
behind the gates become detached not
only physically but politically."
This perceptive document, which
compares the development of gated
communites in Britain and the US, links
the psychological motivations of
middle-class flight to the political
consequences of what happens when
they take their resources with them. Their
desire to find a small area in which they
feel secure only expands the vast areas
where they feel insecure.
"People feel
safer behind gates although at the same
time their fear of the outside world
increases," writes Minto. "This voluntary
exclusion is mirrored by the involuntary
isolation from society of those trapped in
the ghettos of the socially excluded."
An entire infrastructure is erected to keep
the undesirables out. In America private
security firms outspend government law
enforcement by 73%, and have three
times as many employees. The result?
"Ironically," concludes Minto, "according
to American research, crime in gated
communities has been shown not to
decline. What changes is perception."
Its publication was timely not only
Because it highlights a national trend but
also because it serves as a metaphor for
the global order that is simultaneously
being constructed and collapsing around
us. Through inequities in trade abroad and
iniquities of social policy at home we are
creating a local and international
underclass with little stake in our
immediate society. Through our
immigration legislation and enhanced
security networks we seek to contain
them. Through our criminal justice system
and foreign policies we seek to police
them. From gated communities we move
inexorably to gated countries and
continents. Our prisons are full, our
borders fortified, our embassies armed
and global summits take place behind
cordons of riot police - the private
affluence and public squalor of the
Thatcher years gone global.
"There is nothing so dangerous as a man
who has nothing to lose," wrote James
Baldwin, the African-American writer.
"You do not need 10 men, only one will
do." One such man was the shoe bomber,
Richard Reid, who converted to Islam
while he was in and out of young offender
institutions and prison.
For evidence of how little Reid felt he had
to lose, look at his guilty plea to a Boston
court in October. Facing 60 years to life
for trying to blow up a plane Reid told the
court: "Basically I got on the plane with a
bomb. Basically I tried to ignite it.
Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the
plane... I'm a follower of Osama bin
Laden. I'm an enemy of your country and I
don't care."
"The socially excluded are exiles from the
industrial age," says Geoff Mulgan, head
of the government's performance and
innovation unit. "People who can't swim
with the tide of globalisation."
A more accurate description would be not
that they cannot swim with it but that they
are being drowned by it. And as the tides
rise they will grab on to anything available
to keep themselves afloat.
Take the Caribbean.
US administrations,
Democrat and Republican alike, all funded
by American banana-growing interests,
have lobbied to remove the preferential
treatment given to banana growers.
Meanwhile US aid there has slumped by
around a quarter. In small islands
dependent on single crops, this has had a
huge impact. Dominica earned £16m from
bananas in 1993 and only £6m in 2000.
With that kind of decline replicated in the
region, people look for alternative sources
of income. They have found it in the
lucrative and pernicious trade of drug
trafficking. The UN drug control
programme estimates the net regional
earnings of the drug industry in the area at
£2.2bn.
So our cheap bananas come at a price.
First, most of these drugs come to the
west to feed more crime, create more fear
and build even bigger gates.
The second
is that with drug trade of that intensity
comes a culture of violent crime. Before
you know it people coming to the
Caribbean to "get away from it" are having
gated holidays - cooped up behind huge
walls in all-inclusive hotels, for fear that
global inequalities interrupt their rest and
relaxation.
Herein lies the problematic response to
the bombings of Bali and Mombasa. The
shift towards such "soft targets" is a
sinister one. But with the condemnation of
the attacks came indignation that there
was something particularly heinous about
anyone being killed on holiday.
This is not only ludicrous because it
presumes that paradise can reside in
incredibly poor nations, like Indonesia and
Kenya, where impoverished people have
suffered under repressive governments
that the west has propped up for years.
But primarily because it suggests that we
can take weekend breaks from the
mayhem of which we are an integral part
and to which our governments have
contributed.
Israeli and Australian holidaymakers can
no more escape the horrors of terrorism
on the beach than Palestinians can
escape the tyranny of the Israeli army in
their own homes or Afghan refugees can
flee their incarceration at the hands of the
Australian government. The same is true
for the British, Americans and every other
democratic nation.
Not that those who carried out these
atrocities act in the interests of
Palestinians or refugees. Their murderous
ways will only make things worse for
everyone. As the past 15 months have
shown, terrorism of this nature only
strengthens the arm of the most
conservative sections in every community
- whether they champion Mohammed,
Moses or the market. Each attack only
goes to make those who are already
vulnerable even more so. Every Jew is
now regarded as a potential terrorist
target, and every Arab or Muslim regarded
as a potential terrorist.
Nor should it suggest that we are
individually to blame for what is done in
our name, any more than what is done to
us. But that we are collectively
responsible for the actions of the people
who claim to represent us. We are no
more able to flee from that reality than
Felicia is able to flee the chaos of San
Antonio. So long as we continue to
threaten others with war, poverty and
exclusion, we can only expect that we will
continue to feel threatened also. It is not
gates we need to build, but bridges.
g.younge@guardian.co.uk |
