Virtual cities and civic virtues — The semiotics of space in gated communities

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Biographical statement.

Massimo Leone is Research Professor of Semiotics and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid and Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (USA). In 2009-2010, he will be Endeavour Research Visiting Scholar at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne (AU). His work focuses on the role of religion in modern and contemporary cultures and on urban semiotics. Massimo Leone has authored two books and more than 100 papers in semiotics, religious studies, and urban studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe and USA. He is the chief editor of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Torino, Italy.

Virtual cities and civic virtues — The semiotics of space in gated communities. Massimo Leone – Department of Philosophy, University of Torino.

1. An international trend.

“Gated communities” are an important phenomenon in many present-day cities around the world. Statistically, a relevant and rapidly growing number of people lives in gated communities. According to David J. Kennedy, “the growth in the number of residential associations — the legal expression he adopts to designate gated communities and other analogous urban settlements — since [1962] in the USA…is best described as ‘explosive’” (Kennedy 764-5). In 1970, there were 10,000 residential associations; in 1980, 55,000; in 1990, 130,000; and in 1992, 150,000, that is, thirty-two million or roughly twelve percent of the entire USA population (McKenzie 10-11). According to a 1995 report, 28 million USA citizens lived in an area governed by a private community association and 4 million in a closed-off or gated community (Egan A1, A22). In 1998, Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder reckoned that the best estimate of USA households living in gated communities was 2.5 million (Blakely and Snyder 1998: 1).

Gated communities are growing not only in the USA, but also in other countries across the World. Condominios fechados and barrios privados are rapidly spreading in Latin America. As Michael Janoschka and Alex Borsdorf put it, “with the exception of Cuba, gated and access-restricted neighbourhoods have become a key-part of the real-estate market throughout the whole continent” (Janoschka and Borsdorf 93). For instance, according to Cecilia Arizaga, more than 5,000 Argentine families were living in barrios cerrados in 1996 (Arizaga 2000: 1). Analogous urban developments are taking place in Australia, Canada, China (Giroir; Webster, Wu and Zhao), England (Blandy, Dixon, Dupuis, and Parsons), Lebanon (Glasze), Lisbon and Madrid (Wehrhahn and Raposo), Mexico, New Zealand (Blandy, Dixon, Dupuis, and Parsons), Philippines, Russia (Lentz), South Africa (Jürgens and Landman), Thailand, etc.

2. An interdisciplinary issue.

Gated communities can be considered as one of the most characteristic settlements of post-modern and globalized cities. In the last decade, they have attracted the attention of different academic disciplines: economists have focused on the opportunities and externalities that gated communities bring forth in cities (Foldvary); law scholars have concentrated on controversies ignited by the way in which gated communities blur the distinction between the legal concepts of “private” and “public” (McKenzie; Kennedy; Strahilevitz); sociologists have studied the socio-economic structure of households living in gated communities and formulated hypotheses about the reasons for such a choice, especially dwelling on the relation between crime, safety, and gated

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settlements (Arizaga 2000 and 2005); ethnologists and anthropologists have carried on participant observation in several gated communities across the world, developing a qualititative understanding of this urban phenomenon (Setha 2001 and 2003); finally, urban studies and city planning scholars have gauged the shortcomings of gated communities, proposing alternative forms of urban development (Blakely and Snyder 1997 and 1998; Degoutin). A research network on Gated Housing Estates was established and produced several international meetings and publications.

3. A semiotic perspective.

The present article does not intend to merely add a semiotic perspective on gated communities to those that have already been developed by other disciplines, but claims that such a perspective is a prerequisite to carry on with the economic, legal, social, and urban planning research on this phenomenon. As regards ethnology and anthropology, the perspective of semiotics on gated communities shares many elements with those of these two disciplines; yet, semiotics also implies the opportunity to study gated communities through the analysis of the numerous fictional texts that have represented them in the last decade — an opportunity that is frequently neglected by ethno-anthropological research.

3.1. Defining “gated communities”.

The first contribution semiotics may offer to the study of gated communities concerns the problem of their definition. What are “gated communities”? According to David J. Kennedy, the phrase “residential association” – which he adopts as a legal designation of gated communities and other analogous forms of urban settlement — “refers largely to a neighborhood whose members have decided to wall themselves off or privatize their streets rather than to a condominium development that has dominion over little besides a cul-de-sac and a parking lot” (Kennedy 765). According to Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, “gated communities are residential areas with restricted access that makes normally public spaces private” (Blakely and Snyder 1998: 53). Glasze, Webster, and Frantz redub “gated communities” as “privately governed and secured neighbourhoods” (Glasze, Webster, and Frantz 1), etc.

These and other similar definitions show two difficulties. Firstly, if gated communities are a privatization of normally public spaces, what kinds of spaces can be considered as “normally public”? What other spaces, on the contrary, as “normally private”? Secondly, if some privatizations of normally public spaces — such as condominiums, for instance — do not qualify as gated communities according to many scholars, what characteristics must a privatization of normally public spaces display to be considered as a “gated community”? More abstractly, these two difficulties revolve around two of the most important questions of modernity and post-modernity: what is “public”? And what is “private”? And how can “public” turn “private”, and vice versa?

The problem of defining when a space is private or public, and when a privatized public space is a gated community, is relevant not only theoretically, i.e. for the sake of definitions, but also from all the perspectives mentioned above. Analyzing what economic opportunities or externalities gated communities bring about in the public space; studying the way in which public laws apply in gated communities; interpreting such urban settlements as a form of social self-segregation from the public life of present-day cities; elaborating on how the mediatic discourse of fear influences the privatization of the public sphere; understanding how certain features of urban planning encourage or discourage the privatization of space, etc.: all these perspectives depend on the problem of defining which kinds of space are normally public, and which are normally private.

3.2. Legal and cultural norms.

From the legal point of view, “normally” essentially means “according to a norm”, that is, according to an agreement reached by a group of people and codified into a stable formulation, usually expressed in a written form. Thus, a space is normally “public” or “private” when a legal

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norm defines it as such, the norm being the output of social consensus about the nature of the space. Yet, this point of view does not explain why people agree on defining certain spaces as public and certain other spaces as private, nor does it explain the interplay between such distinction and the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate, legal and illegal behaviors. Furthermore, the legal point of view does not offer any explanation about the way in which such definitions may vary both diachronically and synchronically: a space that a legal norm defines as public in a certain period and context may be defined as private in another period and context.

Hence, the difficulty of defining the concepts of “public” and “private”, “public space” and “private space”, and, as a result, “privatization of public space” turns out to be not only a problem of law but also one of language. Understanding what “privatization of a normally public space” means from the legal point of view needs formulating hypotheses about what “normally” means from a semantic point of view. This need is evident if one considers the following classic legal statement about the importance of free speech in public streets. Such statement seeks to regulate legal controversies such as Marsh v. Alabama, concerning the right of a Jehovah’s Witness to distribute religious leaflets in Chickasaw, Alabama — a company town in which every street was owned by a private corporation:

Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thought between citizens, and discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties of citizens. (Hague v. CIO, 307 U.S. 496, 515 (1939))

The argument of this legal statement can be resumed as follows: although the streets of a town are owned by private subjects, the cultural history of USA streets is such that they must be considered as a normally public space. Therefore, freedom of speech cannot be restricted in corporate-owned streets as if they were a private space, but must be regulated as if they were a public space. More generally, this and other legal statements basically indicate that the economic and the cultural definitions of what is public and what is private do not always coincide, and the fact that a space is economically defined as the property of a private does not always imply that such space is normally private. This discrepancy is evident whenever contradictions between the economic and the cultural definitions of space arise. Behaviors that might be illegitimate or even illegal in a certain space, when its economic definition is considered, might be legal or even legitimate if its cultural definition is taken into account. Thus, the task of legal scholars is to recompose such contradictions by considering both the economic and the cultural definitions of space. Obviously, the final equilibrium between cultural traditions and economic trends also depends on political assumptions about what kind of interplay between economic and cultural forces should articulate space in a society.

3.3. The task of cultural semiotics.

However, understanding the cultural definition of a certain space in a particular period and context is not the task of legal scholars, although such understanding is fundamental for the formulation of their judgments. It is rather the task of a cultural semiotics of space: a systematic study of the way in which different cultures in different historical periods elaborate different typologies of spaces and give them different semantic connotations, for instance a “public” connotation as more or less rigidly opposed to a “private” connotation. Such systematic study must be not only synchronic but also diachronic. It must describe, for instance, the way in which old local cultural definitions of public space interact with new global economic definitions of private space.

From such semiotic perspective, the legal definition of gated communities as the privatization of normally public spaces can be reformulated as follows: a gated community is an urban settlement where the economic definition of private space is in sharp contrast with the definition of private space characterizing the society surrounding it. In other words, a community is

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“gated” not because it marks the economic privatization of its streets through fences, barriers, and gates, but because such marks of economic privatization are in sharp contrast with the way in which streets should be marked according to the society that surrounds the gated community. Therefore, a gated community is an “abnormally” privatized space not because such privatization infringes a certain legal norm, but because it infringes a certain cultural norm, the way in which a society considers a certain way of marking space as “normal”, as “socially acceptable”.

3.4. A semiotic meta-language.

In order to understand which articulations of space and which connotations of it as public or private are considered as normal by a certain culture in a particular historical period and context, a cultural semiotics of space must develop a meta-language capable of comparing different articulations of space. The first and foremost problem in creating such meta-language is that the meta-discourse of semioticians is not unbiased, but influenced by a certain culture of space, for instance, by certain cultural assumptions about the public or private nature of certain spaces. So as to limit these biases, and increase the inter-subjective validity of the meta-language, the best option is probably that of elaborating it on the basis of a series of phenomenological polarizations. According to such structural meta-language, for instance, a space is never essentially public or private, but always relatively so. In other words, a space is public because it is less private than a more private space, whereas a space is private because it is less public than a more public space. The phenomenological criteria that allow the semiotic meta-language to range different kinds of space according to whether they are more or less public/private are fundamentally three: access, exposure, and control.

3.5. The phenomenology of public/private space: access, exposure, and control.

As regards access, a space “A” to which access is more restricted than to a space “B” will generally be considered as more private than “B”. As regards exposure, a space “A” in which an individual is more exposed to other individuals than in a space “B” will generally be considered as more public than “B”. As it is evident, exposure is usually directly proportional to access: the more a space “A” is accessible, the more an individual in “A” will be exposed to other individuals, and the more “A” will generally be considered as more a public space than a space “B”, to which access is more restricted and in which exposure to other individuals is inferior. As regards control, a space “A” in which behaviors are socially regulated than in a space “B” will generally be considered as more private than “B”. As it is evident, control is directly proportional to both access and exposure.

These three phenomenological polarizations of the public/private space roughly correspond to the famous tripartite categorization of signs in Peirce’s semiotics: a space can be connoted as public or private firstly according to the indexical relation between the space and the physical presence of a body in it; secondly according to the iconic relation between the presence of the body in the space and its analogical representation through exposure; and thirdly according to the symbolic relation between the presence of the body in the space, its analogical representation through exposure, and the codes that regulate the behaviors of the body in the space when exposed to the bodies of other individuals.

3.6. The circularity of spaces and behaviors.

This semiotic meta-language should, therefore, be capable of describing the way in which a certain cultural semiotics of space, predominant in a certain society in a particular period of its history, determines the levels of access, exposure, and control that different spaces must display so as to be considered as normally private or as normally public. Such articulation is strictly related to an articulation of the publicity/privacy of behaviors, according to a circularity that is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle once and for all. On the one hand, a normally public or private space must be characterized by more or less access, exposure, and control in a certain society according to the way in which this society determines the normality of access, exposure, and control of the

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behaviors that are going to take place in such space. For instance, a public toilet with transparent walls would be considered as an abnormally public space in most cultures, since such space would be characterized by a level of exposure that is abnormally high in comparison to the level of exposure that most cultures consider as normal for the behaviors that take place in public toilets.

On the other hand, space is not merely a receptacle whose level of publicity or privacy changes according to the behaviors that it must contain. On the contrary, the circularity between the publicity/privacy of space and the publicity/privacy of the behaviors that take place in space consists in the fact that spaces and behaviors are interdependent: a space is characterized by a certain level of access, exposure, and control because it must host a more or less public/private behavior. At the same time, a certain behavior shows a certain level of access, exposure, and control because it must be hosted by a more or less public/private place. For instance, making love in the elevator of a condominium is considered as inappropriate in most cultures because the levels of access, exposure, and control that are characteristic of such elevator are abnormally higher than those that most cultures consider as normal in making love. Both public toilets with transparent walls (such as they can be found is some clubs) and making love in the elevator of a condominium are a transgression exactly because they give rise to a mismatch between the publicity/privacy of spaces and the publicity/privacy of behaviors. In the first case, a space is too public in comparison to how private a behavior that takes place in that space normally is. In the second case, a behavior is too private in comparison to how public the space where the behavior takes place normally is.

In general, the cultural semiotics of a certain society in a certain historical period and cultural context considers a space as characterized by a normal level of publicity/privacy when the level of access, exposure, and control characterizing the space is suitable to the level of access, exposure, and control of the behaviors that such space must contain, and vice versa. The semiotic meta-language of space avoids reproducing essentialist preconceptions of space, according to which certain spaces are intrinsically public and certain other spaces intrinsically private. It demonstrates, on the contrary, that the publicity/privacy of spaces in a society is always relative: relative to the publicity/privacy of behaviors that take place in such spaces in such society; relative to the publicity/privacy of other spaces in the same society; relative to the publicity/privacy of the same spaces in different historical periods of the same society or in different societies.

Such meta-language will help answering a question that is fundamental in understanding the semiotics of space in gated communities: what is abnormal in the way in which they privatize public space? Since according to the theoretical frame exposed above abnormality in publicity/privacy is always relative, the best way to answer such fundamental question is through comparison between gated communities and other forms of urban settlements. Like gated communities, condominiums too consist in a privatization of public space resulting in parking lots, lobbies, stairs, elevators, landings, etc. Yet, most scholars do not consider condominiums as gated communities, that is, they do not consider them as involving abnormal privatizations of public space. But what is the difference between gated communities and condominiums? Why is the privatization of the former considered as abnormal, whereas the privatization of the latter is considered as normal (given the semiotics of space of present-day ‘Western’ cities)? Answering this question will require analyzing the different ways in which these different kinds of urban settlements conceive of “transitional spaces”.

4. “Normal” transitional spaces.

Transitional spaces are architecturally and semantically intermediate between opposite kinds of space, for instance, between predominantly public and predominantly private spaces. Like other forms of urban settlements, condominiums too contain certain “transitional spaces” whose level of publicity/privacy is intermediate between that of the predominantly public space of a street and that of the predominantly private space of an apartment. In this case, the street and the apartment can be considered as two opposite polarities in the phenomenology of the urban space according to the semantic dichotomy public/private: the street is characterized by the highest levels of access,

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exposure, and control, whereas the apartment by the lowest levels of such phenomenological parameters. As a result, rather public behaviors preferably occur in the street, whereas rather private behaviors preferably occur in the apartment1_.

In a condominium, parking lots, lobbies, stairs, elevators, landings, etc. are transitional spaces. In most present-day cities these spaces are considered as more private than streets and as more public than apartments. The levels of access, exposure, and control that they display are usually intermediate between those of the two polarities. For instance, whereas a street is usually accessible to everybody, the lobby of a condominium is usually inaccessible without the permission of one of the residents. At the same time, access to the lobby is not as restricted as access to an apartment in the condominium. The same goes for exposure and control. As a result, such transitional spaces are often ambiguous. In other words, individuals must decide which behaviors are appropriate for the levels of access, exposure, and control that these transitional spaces display. For instance, when I come across a stranger in the lobby must I behave as when I come across a stranger in the public space of a street, or rather as when I come across a stranger in the private space of my apartment door? Must I greet them or not? The semantic ambiguity of these transitional spaces is such that individuals with different backgrounds often do not interpret them in the same way: for instance, some will behave in elevators as if they were public spaces, avoiding private conversations in presence of strangers; others, instead, will behave as if elevators were the sitting-rooms of their apartments, sometimes embarrassing strangers with private conversations.

The privatization that gives rise to transitional spaces in present-day condominiums is mostly considered as normal because these spaces display two characteristics: firstly, they tend to be a thin threshold between public and private spaces; secondly, their more or less public/private nature tends to be considered as flexible, as a matter of individual interpretation within certain limits. This does not rule out the fact that individuals with different cultural backgrounds might consider the privatization of public space implied by condominiums as ‘abnormal’. In many present-day Italian condominiums, for instance, controversies between Italian and non-Italian tenants often arise because they tend to hold different conceptions about how much access, exposure, and control should characterize transitional spaces such as lobbies, landings, stairs, etc. However, mainstream citizens have accepted the privatization of public space implied by present-day condominium as normal.

5. ‘Abnormal’ transitional spaces.

On the basis of the theoretical frame exposed above and the resulting sketch of phenomenological analysis of transitional spaces in present-day condominiums, it is easier to understand why gated communities might be generally considered as an ‘abnormal’ privatization of public space. Physical thinness and semantic flexibility, the two main characteristics of transitional spaces in present-day condominiums, are both distorted in gated communities.

As regards the first element, whereas in mainstream condominiums lobbies, stairs, landings, elevators, etc. tend to be characterized as a line of transition between a much wider public space (the city) and a relatively wider private space (the apartment) — or vice versa —, in gated communities this line expands into a zone, including gardens, parks, streets, crossroads, squares, commercial malls, swimming pools, golf resorts, health clinics, and, in extreme cases, entire cities. Hence, whereas residents of ‘normal’ condominiums face the public space of the city soon after crossing the transitional line of stairs, elevators, lobbies, etc., residents of gated communities face the public space only after crossing a huge transitional zone of streets, squares, gardens, etc. Given such expansion of the transitional line into a transitional zone, whereas in condominiums residents mostly walk from the private space of their apartments across the transitional line into the public space of the city, progressively moving their bodies from privacy to publicity, in gated communities

1_{This does not rule out that these two extreme poles may not show interior articulations of different levels of} publicity/privacy: on the one hand, a bathroom is certainly characterized by less access, exposure, and control than a sitting room; on the other hand, a sidewalk and the “middle of a street” show a similar gradient of publicity/privacy.

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residents mostly drive from the transitional to the public space, sheltered by the predominantly private space of their cars. In fact, many of them may never immerse their bodies in the public space of the city before driving again across the line between such space and the relatively more private space of an office, a commercial mall, a fitness club, etc. Indeed, in more and more gated communities, a system of internal garages and elevators allows residents to move from private space “A” to private space “B” through a series of transitional spaces, without ever stepping into public space.

As regards the second element, i.e. the way in which gated communities distort the semantics of transitional spaces, the expansion of the transitional line into transitional zone is not neutral, since it bestows a transitional semantics upon spaces that are normally public, i.e., that are normally characterized by less restricted access, more exposure, and more control. Access to transitional spaces in gated communities is abnormally restricted, especially considering their extraordinary expansion. Whereas in mainstream cities access to streets, squares, gardens, and other traditionally public spaces is not restricted (restrictions might apply to drivers, but from a certain point of view they represent a limit to the privatization of public access), in gated communities residents are certain that once they cross the threshold between the public space of their homes and the huge transitional space that surrounds them, they are not going to come across “aliens”, but only other residents. In other words, they are going to come across people with analogous economic, social, cultural, and often even ethnic status. As regards exposure in the transitional spaces of gated communities, it is abnormally low in comparison to the level of exposure in the public space of cities. Once again, residents are sure that they are not going to be perceived by strangers, but only by fellow residents of the gated community. Finally, control in the transitional space of gated communities is also a peer-control: residents are sure that neither strangers nor the police are going to control their behaviors, but only other fellow residents, or the private police appointed by the members of the gated community to patrol its transitional spaces.

Thus, since public space in gated communities acquires the phenomenology of transitional space, space that is outside such (pseudo-) transitional space acquires the (usually hostile) phenomenology of “ultra-public” space. Yet, this ultra-public space cannot be separated from the (pseudo-) transitional space by a further transitional threshold. The separation must be clear. This is the reason for which in gated communities such threshold is usually dramatized into a frontier, leaving no ambiguity, and therefore no freedom, as regards the interpretation of space. Walls, fences, gates, sometimes even barbed wire, as well as various systems of surveillance, mark very clearly the difference between the (pseudo-) transitional space of gated communities and the (hostile) (ultra-) public space.

6. Causes and effects.

Why do people choose to live in gated communities? What are the effects that such an abnormal privatization of public space exerts on the cultural semiotics of space in present-day cities around the world? Traditional social sciences are probably better equipped than semiotics to answer the first question. Nevertheless, the way in which the meta-language of semiotics describes the space of gated communities in comparison to the space of non-gated urban settlements may offer some clues. In general, such description points out that most people might choose to live in gated communities because they wish to reduce the semiotic indeterminacy of mainstream cities. Such wish is particularly evident as regards interpersonal relations. When citizens of non-gated urban settlements step out of their homes, they come across people of different economic, social, cultural, and ethnic background. The semiotic indeterminacy of this variety is more or less restricted in transitional spaces — where people are familiar with each other and might share a common background — but dramatically increases when residents step out of such transitional spaces into the public space of the city (although in this case too a reduction of semiotic indeterminacy might take place through dynamics that guarantee the economic, social, cultural, and ethnic homogeneity of a certain urban area).

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The more the population of a city is various and well-integrated, the more citizens will come across in the public space people who are a semiotic puzzle to them. What is the economic class, social status, cultural background, ethnical group of this alien citizen whom I am coming across, walking along a sidewalk of the city? And, more important: what are her/his intentions toward me? Will she/he simply pass me by, will she/he stop me to ask me something, will she/he attack me to steal my money, to rape me, to kill me, etc.? Reactions toward such indeterminacy might be more or less euphoric (curiosity), more or less disphoric (fear). In any case, if citizens want to survive in present-day cities, they must learn to produce quick abductions about those whom they come across in the transitional and especially in the public space.

From this point of view, gated communities work as systems that reduce the semiotic indeterminacy of the public space. Every abduction entails both an effort (new knowledge must be brought about on the basis of old knowledge) and risk (new knowledge might be wrong). People who choose to live in gated communities consciously or unconsciously prefer to give up this effort and risk. Indeed, residents of gated communities do not need to abduce anything about the identity and the intentions of their residents. They simply deduce it from the fact that they are fellow-residents.

Hypotheses about the reasons for which people choose to live in gated communities should be specified on an individual basis. Blakely and Snyder, for example, have shown that gated communities can be categorized into lifestyle communities, prestige communities, and security zones, according to the rationale behind the choice of gating a community (Blakely and Snyder 1997). In all these categories, though, gates work not only as physical barriers — restricting the access to the transitional space that separates the public space of the city and the private one of the residents’ homes — but also as semiotic barriers — determining the patterns of meaning within the gated community with a lower level of complexity than in the public space of the city. It is only through adopting this semiotic point of view that one can understand, for instance, why many people justify their choice to live in gated communities with reference to fear of crime, whilst statistical data show that crimes are actually decreasing in the areas that surround the gated communities or are less common than in the rest of the city. In fact, people who wall themselves off in gated communities are not simply scared of crime. They are scared of the semiotic complexity of present-day cities. They fear that they are not going to be able to cope with it.

As regards the possible effects of living in gated communities semiotics can give an even more substantial contribution since gated communities are, after all, a system of signification and communication, a way in which residents communicate a certain conception of urban life through space to both insiders and outsiders. As regards insiders, fictional representations of gated communities have explored the potential effects of these urban settlements maybe more than social scientists have. For instance, British writer James Graham Ballard (1930 – 2009) set at least two of his novels, Running Wild (Ballard 1988) and Super-Cannes (Ballard 2000), in gated communities. In both cases, they are represented as heavily dystopian places. In Running Wild, in particular, Ballard tells the story of how the hyper-regulated life of teenagers in a British gated community pushed them to plan and carry out a mass-murder of their parents and a subsequent escape. The novel concentrates on a major paradox of gated communities: conceived in order to protect their residents from access of, exposure to, and control by strangers, gated communities can turn into voluntary prisons where transitional spaces are constantly under surveillance. As Sergeant Payne tells the investigator who is inquiring about the mass-murder in Running Wild: “The dogs and cameras keep people out, but they also keep them in, doctor” (Ballard 1988: 19). Indeed, ethnological survey has shown that most people who live in gated communities would move out only to another gated community (Low 2001) since the self-imposed captivity of these urban settlements is probably addictive: it makes residents unable to cope with the ‘wild’ complexity of the city.

Another major consequence the semiotics of space in gated communities exerts on insiders has been effectively pointed out by another fictional representation, Rodrigo Plà’s movie La Zona

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(2007). The story is set in a fictional Mexican gated community. One night a lightening strikes a billboard next to the walls of La Zona, as the community is nicknamed. Three young and poor outsiders realize that they can use the billboard as a bridge to break into the gated community and rob one of its rich households. But their plans go wrong: an old resident of La Zona gets killed by one of the thieves. He and one of his accomplices get killed by a private guard while they seek to escape. The private guard gets killed by mistake by a poor-sighted neighbor. The third accomplice, instead, manages to hide in the basement of one of the villas of La Zona. Residents are therefore confronted with a moral dilemma: should they denounce what happened overnight in the gated community, thus losing the juridical privileges they were granted under the condition that no crime would occur in La Zona, or should they hide all the traces of the crime (including the corpses of the thieves and the private guard) and thwart the investigations by the police? They choose the second option, but must solve a problem: the third young accomplice is still in the gated community. What should they do with him?

The dramatic development and the tragic conclusion of the story point out another controversial effect gated communities produce on their residents: physical separation from the public space of the city encourages them to consider the space within the walls of the gated community as a space with no economic, social, cultural, and, what is worse, legal ties to the space outside. Both scholarly analyses and fictional representations show that the idea of such separation is a myth: gated communities (still) continue to be dependent on the public space of the city as regards many of their services and activities. Most staff members of gated communities, for instance — from private guards to chauffeurs — do not usually live within their walls. Yet, the presence of physical barriers and systems of surveillance that strongly limit the access of, the exposure to, and the control by strangers/outsiders in gated communities often bring about an impression of social seclusion that is shared by both residents and outsiders. From this point of view, gated communities are a sort of post-modern inverted ghettos: while in traditional ghettos (for example the Jewish ghettos of early-modern Italy, from which the word “ghetto” derives) segregation in a restricted space was imposed to a minority by a majority mostly according to a racist rationale, in present-day gated communities segregation out of a restricted space is imposed upon a majority by a minority usually according to an economic rationale tainted with racism. Moreover, whereas the creation of ghettos usually generates a centrifugal tension (segregated people want to move from the space within the ghetto to the space outside of it), the creation of gated communities usually generates a centripetal tension (segregated people want to move from the space outside the gated community to the space inside of it).

Indeed, one of the communication effects gated communities produce on outsiders is the generation of an ambiguous feeling of desire and rejection. If this effect is explicitly planned in the case of prestige communities (where the segregation of gated communities is meant to produce a feeling of social exclusivity in the insiders and a feeling of social envy in the outsiders), in the case of security zones such an effect is paradoxical. Conceived of as a shelter from crime, gated communities end up enticing criminal behaviors.

7. Conclusions.

Given the relativist framework adopted by the present paper, it cannot be ruled out that what present-day scholars consider as a privatization of normally public space will become the norm. Indeed, if the urban phenomenon of gated communities will continue to spread throughout the world, maybe one day the semiotics of space that they imply will not be thought of as more abnormal than the semiotics of space of present-day condominiums. Offering suggestions about which cultures of space, and which connotations of publicity/privacy might be preferable for the future of humanity is not the task of semiotics. Yet, the semiotic analysis of gated communities points out something that all those who promote this or similar kinds of settlements should take into account: if more and more citizens will choose to live in gated communities, the drastic reduction of semiotic indeterminacy that this choice brings about will eventually result into the death of cities as

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they have been defined by most human civilizations for several centuries. J.G. Ballard effectively foreshadows the consequences of such a process in the description of Eden-Olympia, the dystopic gated community where he sets the novel Super-Cannes (2000):

Intimacy and neighbourliness were not features of everyday life at Eden-Olympia. An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues. At Eden-Olympia there were no parking problems, no fears of burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings. The top-drawer professionals no longer needed to devote a moment’s thought to each other, and had dispensed with the checks and balances of community life. There were no town councils or magistrates’ courts, no citizens’ advice bureaux. Civility and polity were designed in Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force. (Ballard 2000: 38)

A certain level of semiotic indeterminacy — the fact that citizens constantly come across unknown new phenomena, and constantly make abductions in order to turn old knowledge into knowledge of the new phenomena — is a fundamental ingredient of cities. Curtailing or eliminating opportunities for such abductions by drastically reducing the level of urban semiotic indeterminacy will eventuate in a situation where lack of effort and risk will turn into lack of creativity and intelligence, into the creation of virtual cities without civic virtues.

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