Beyond Gated Communities

Research on gated communities is moving away from the hard concept of a 'gated community' to the more fluid one of urban gating. The latter allows communities to be viewed through a new lens of soft boundaries, modern communication and networks of influence. The book, written by an international team of experts, builds on the research of Bagaeen and Uduku’s previous edited publication, Gated Communities (Routledge 2010) and relates recent events to trends in urban research, showing how the discussion has moved from privatised to newly collectivised spaces, which have been the focal point for events such as the Occupy London movement and the Arab Spring. Communities are now more mobilised and connected than ever, and Beyond Gated Communities shows how neighbourhoods can become part of a global network beyond their own gates. With chapters on Australia, Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, this is a truly international resource for scholars and students of urban studies interested in this dynamic, growing area of research.

Using Toronto as a case study, Subdivided asks how cities would function if decision-makers genuinely accounted for race, ethnicity, and class when confronting issues such as housing, policing, labor markets, and public space. With essays contributed by an array of city-builders, it proposes solutions for fully inclusive communities that respond to the complexities of a global city. Jay Pitter is a writer and professor based in Toronto. She holds a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University. John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist who writes about urban affairs, politics, and business. He co-edited The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood (Coach House, 2015).

This book examines the nature and dynamics of gated communities within the specificities of reform Shanghai, a city that arguably has been at the forefront of China’s new urban/consumer revolution.

Moving beyond conventional accounts of gated communities and housing segregation, this book interrogates the moral politics of urban place-making in China’s commodity housing enclaves. Drawing on fieldwork and survey conducted in Shanghai, Pow critically demonstrates how gated communities are bound up in the cultural reproduction of middle-class landscape that is entrenched in the politics of the good life – defined in terms of a highly segregated landscape secured and maintained through the territorialisation of privilege, lifestyle and private property. The study challenges the concept of gated communities as simply ‘spatial containers’ of social classes and argues that Shanghai’s gated enclaves may be more fruitfully analyzed as critical sites of and for the production and consumption of an exclusive lifestyle where nascent middle-class sensibilities and identities are being (re)presented, cultivated and lived. In the final analysis, the book addresses an overarching normative concern by examining how social-spatial differentiation and exclusion in Shanghai’s gated communities potentially disrupt, challenge and unsettle the modern ideals of urban life. By adopting a geographical moral perspective, this book illuminates the moral complexities and ambiguities of place-making in Shanghai’s increasingly polarized urban landscape. As the first book length academic study on gated communities in China, this book will appeal broadly to those with interests in Urban studies and urban social development in China.

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this book explores the methodological and heuristic implications of studying cities in relation to one another. Moving fluidly between comparative and transnational methods, as well as across regional and national lines, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the necessity of this broader view in assessing not just the fundamentals of urban life, the way cities are occupied and organised on a daily basis, but also the urban mindscape, the way cities are imagined and represented. In doing so the volume provides valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of using multiple cities to form historical inquiries.

This edited collection provides an alternative discourse on cities evolving with physically and virtually networked communities—the ‘digital polis’—and offers a variety of perspectives from the humanities, media studies, geography, architecture, and urban studies. As an emergent concept that encompasses research and practice, the digital polis is oriented toward a counter-mapping of the digital cityscape beyond policing and gatekeeping in physical and virtual gated communities. Considering the digital polis as offering potential for active support of socially just and politically inclusive urban circumstances in ways that mirror the Greek polis, our attention is drawn towards the interweaving of the development of digital technology, urban space, and social dynamics. The four parts of this book address the formation of technosocial subjectivity, real-and-virtual combined urbanity, the spatial dimensions of digital exclusion and inclusion, and the prospect of emancipatory and empowering digital citizens. Individual chapters cover varied topics on digital feminism, data activism, networked individualism, digital commons, real-virtual communalism, the post-family imagination, digital fortress cities, rights to the smart city, online foodscapes, and open-source urbanism across the globe. Contributors explore the following questions: what developments can be found over recent decades in both physical and virtual communities such as cyberspace, and what will our urban future be like? What is the ‘digital polis’ and what kinds of new subjectivity does it produce? How does digital technology, as well as its virtuality, reshape the city and our spatial awareness of it? What kinds of exclusion and cooperation are at work in communities and spaces in the digital age? Each chapter responds to these questions in its own way, navigating readers through routes toward the digital polis. Chapter "Introduction - The digital polis and its practices: Beyond gated communities" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The authors not only investigate the current forms of property rights on reservations but also expose the limitations of each system, showing that customary rights are insecure, certificates of possession cannot be sold outside the First Nation, and leases are temporary. As well, analysis of legislation, court decisions, and economic reports reveals that current land management has led to unnecessary economic losses. The authors propose creation of a First Nations Property Ownership Act that would make it possible for First Nations to take over full ownership of reserve lands from the Crown, arguing that permitting private property on reserves would provide increased economic advantages. An engaging and well-reasoned book, Beyond the Indian Act is a bold argument for a new system that could improve the quality of life for First Nations people in communities across the country.