Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives

For the antagonist, private communities are icons of post-consensus, fragmenting civic society, enclosing and excluding by contractual constitution and sometimes by walls and gates. For others they are simply an efficient new way of organizing urban life. Private Cities brings together an international team of authors in an attempt to construct an interdisciplinary discourse on the global spread of private communities based upon empirical evidence. Case studies from the US, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and China are used to explore local and global explanations of the phenomenon. Two distinct propositions emerge from the analysis, firstly that private neighborhoods are a manifestation of the processes bound up in the globalization of culture and economy. Alternatively they can be seen to emerge and adapt locally. Unifying the chapters is the notion that private neighborhoods are a new territorial form of organization on a local scale. The volume takes an institutionalistapproach, developing a model in which cities are shaped by the interplay of local and global processes and evolve at the interface of spontaneous and planned order. It seeks to draw together the various themes, propositions and hypotheses in a way that clarifies the questions asked in different ways by different social science perspectives and in a way that poses researchable questions and new agendas.