The first decades of the 21st century have confirmed some of the biggest fears of dystopian futuristic literature and movies. More than half of the world's population is concentrated in cities, and instead of fostering collective life, there is a growing number of groups enabling and craving isolated, protected urban spaces. Technological advances have brought remarkable changes that facilitate everyday lives; however, they have also contributed to increased social inequalities in which they serve as a medium to produce more complex barriers instead of bridges to mitigate the already existing tensions between social groups. Planning professionals worldwide, therefore, face an enormous challenge trying to make cities more liveable because even if global initiatives like the New Urban Agenda or the Sustainable Development Goals supposedly aim for more equitable, sustainable, diverse, and inclusive cities, the current trend to differentiate and isolate makes it much harder to accomplish, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise of the gated city in Latin America, as portrayed through the Mexican case described in previous chapters, is a symptom of a much deeper societal problem. Gated communities are the physical reflection of the region's inequalities, fears, distrust in institutions, and fragmented social interactions. Urban fragmentation is the consequence of the concentration of pockets of privileged groups with differentiated access to exclusive residential and commercial spaces, as well as privatised options of services, urban mobility, leisure, sports, health, and education facilities.

Mexican cities are struggling with urban fragmentation due to growing concerns over crime, violence, inequalities, and uncertainty. Gated communities have proliferated in recent decades, not only as a response to such challenges but also in response to structural conditions on global and national levels that facilitate their creation. This chapter focuses on the first scale of the gatedness analysis framework, exploring the global and national connections with the urban gating process in Mexico. It explores how neoliberal transnational policies and changes in national and housing policies, along with global financial forces and the debt economy, have enabled new fragmented urban configurations. It also addresses Mexico's diminishing state and its impact on spatial planning. There is also an analysis of the aspirations and expectations of Mexican society, particularly the middle classes, and a discussion of the boundaries and control measures that define modern Mexican gated communities and fragmented urban life. The core aim of this chapter is to reveal to the reader that the gating phenomenon is more complex than a group of individuals deciding to self-segregate, and that macro-level policies and social practices have a strong impact on urban life.

Structural incentives and constraints in Mexican gating

Gating in Mexico has become standard practice in residential, public, and private spaces since the 1990s. The gating process can be linked to the sprawling urbanisation process that started in the 1970s with informal and semi-formal settlements but mainly to the market-oriented national reforms of the 1990s inspired by global forces such as the Washington Consensus’ and institutions like the World Bank, which had a profound impact on planning, urban development models, and housing production policies (Zanetta, 2004). These policies changed urban spaces’ economic and social dynamics and physicality.

This book is the result of ten years of academic research, professional consultancy experience, and community engagement connected to the fragmented urban growth process since the 1990s in Puebla's metropolitan area in Mexico. I conceived this book as an opportunity to address the urban gating phenomenon beyond the usual social and spatial segregation concerns by focusing on policy implications, everyday practices, local government challenges, and financial drivers. The book offers a comprehensive analysis of urban fragmentation and the privatisation of public life and planning practice in the Latin American context. It presents a specific case study of an extreme case of gatedness in Mexico, which shows the interconnections between policies, social practices, and meanings in the emergence and proliferation of these fortified spaces.

The book may interest urban planning students, public officials, policy makers, and scholars interested in Latin American land, housing, and spatial planning policy challenges and the rise of gated urban environments. Readers from around the globe will find synergies and relevant messages for their own increasingly divided cities. The book also offers a practice-based analysis framework based on the concept of gatedness, whose multi-scalar and multi-dimensional approach might serve future planners and researchers for a better understanding of urban fragmentation with tools that will enable them to provide creative solutions in complex, divided contexts. The framework was created based on one case study, but it can be used as a pathway for researchers and practitioners worldwide.

The Mexican metropolisation process presents critical challenges, mainly connected to the growing demands from peripheral municipalities to accommodate new residential developments. This chapter presents the second scale of the gatedness analysis framework, focusing on a regional scale using the case study setting of Puebla's metropolitan area. It explores how structural conditions, such as regional planning policies, limited municipal capacities, and financial interests in suburban development, can incentivise or constrain the gating process. It also explores how voluntary displacement, urban branding, and social practices connected to the privatisation of public life are instrumental in the appeal of gated urban life. Finally, it describes different physical barriers and control measures used in the city’ sprawling peripheries. This chapter presents the historical and structural conditions that paved the way for peripheral gated spaces while exploring the aspirations and anxieties that drove voluntary displacement to the suburbs and the factors behind extreme cases of fortification like the gated community Lomas de Angelópolis.

Regional structural incentives and constraints for metropolitan urban fragmentation

Between the 1990s and early 2020s, Puebla's metropolitan area has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of gated communities and other gated public and private facilities. Puebla– Tlaxcala's Grand Metropolitan Area (Zona Metropolitana Puebla– Tlaxcala) stands as the fourth largest metropolitan area in Mexico, with a population of 3,200,000 (INEGI, 2021). It is one of the nation's key commercial, educational, and industrial hubs; its constant growth was triggered by the arrival of one of the largest Volkswagen factories in America in the 1960s. This metro area has been identified as a ‘strategic spatial unit’ and one of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries’ most dynamic and fast-growing regions (OECD, 2013).

As the world population grows and cities have become the centre of human activity, urban life has become one of the most important objects of study for the social sciences. One of the main societal discussions is about the presence of increasingly fortified residential enclaves. In Mexican cities, these exclusionary places have burgeoned since the 1990s. However, despite the often very trenchant critique of these spaces in much research, this criticism has by no means hindered their proliferation, which highlights the disconnect between academic work and applied practices in planning, urban design, and real estate development. This chapter presents some of the key discussions regarding urban life and social interaction, as well as related exclusionary practices. The focus here is very much on urban fragmentation rather than socio-spatial segregation, which has tended to dominate the academic discussion because the concept refers to both the tangible and intangible borders and boundaries that affect social interaction in the city. Urban fragmentation has been associated with the increasing presence of physical barriers, walls, buffer zones, and other design elements that have had the effect of breaking up the core sense of the city as a more or less unified public whole and a space accessible to all. The chapter also discusses the privatisation of public life, which is a much richer concept than the privatisation of public space, as it transcends the tenure, use, or physical configuration of urban space and can help us understand how people live in the city and how this affects interaction. The focus on planning practice, urban fragmentation, and privatisation of public life is presented to highlight the increasing impact of exclusionary urban configurations on people's everyday lives.

In Puebla's metropolitan area in Mexico, hundreds of fortified residential developments have helped to reconfigure the fabric of the city's sprawling periphery since the turn of the century. Two of these enclaves particularly caught my eye. They shared the typical markers of a gated community: fences or walls surrounding a group of houses, streets, and other amenities (Low, 2010), security-controlled access gates, and extra layers of protection, privacy, and security represented by security guards, CCTV cameras, and private dead-end streets or cul-de-sacs. Nevertheless, these developments targeted very different socioeconomic groups: where one was aimed at the low-income population, the other attracted a combination of middle-and high-income groups. I was curious about the design of public spaces such as parks, streets, and shared sports and leisure facilities in the residential developments. I wondered if the residents saw and experienced their public spaces differently. First, did they see these spaces as merely ornamental? And, second, were these spaces contributing to community life?

I engaged a small group of architecture students to explore these questions, and the results were unexpected – the main findings were not about the quality of the design of the parks, streets, or clubhouses. First, residents in these gated communities were very sensitive about their decision to live in such a community and felt judged by outsiders for doing so – in fact, a couple of residents we spoke to rushed to justify themselves before the interview even started. Second, residents were far less interested in responding to our questions about using the parks or the quality of the open spaces than sharing the fears, aspirations, anxieties, and hopes that motivated them to move to these enclaves.

This section addresses policy making based on a further understanding of aspirations and anxieties. The proposal to reclaim the open city is based on different elements identified through the three scales and three dimensions of the gatedness analysis framework used to analyse the Mexican gating case. It recognises the power of aspirations, anxieties, fears, and hopes in policy making and the shaping of fragmented urban spaces. The primary considerations for more just and inclusive spaces are organised according to the three spheres of gatedness: structural conditions, cognitive-affective dispositions, and open physical spaces instead of boundaries. The ideas are based on different aspirations and anxieties shaping policies, practices, and physical environments. The policy design is based on simple, non-technical language to be used as inspiration for planning students, policy makers, and public officials in diverse settings, considering the following.

Reinforce institutions to strengthen local capacities

Global forces and national policies are highly influential in local conditions; however, policy implementation, regulation interpretation, and decision making are conducted locally. We have not fully recognised how local decisions are based on individuals and groups, with the agency responding to external pressures to understand the implications. The following subsections outline the main tools, or principles, for better policy making at a local level.

Strengthen municipal finances

Municipalities in Mexico are dealing with rapid urbanisation and fiscal challenges after years of extraction, corruption, and increased demand for infrastructure, security, and public services. Local budgets are insufficient, and tax increases are a political risk. The current model is based on urban development plans with a limited impact that only validates existing projects.

Since the late 1990s, scholars have shown a growing interest in new patterns of exclusion and fortification in cities (Marcuse, 1997). Seminal literature like Blakely and Snyder's Fortress America (1997) provided the language and key typologies and identified the main drivers of gated communities in the US. Davis's City of Quartz (1990) and McKenzie's Privatopia (1994) warned about the risks and challenges of the privatisation of urban and residential life, and Caldeira's City of Walls (2000) and Low's Behind the Gates (2003) alerted readers to fortification as a response to the fear of crime. This chapter explores discussions since the 1990s and how gated communities have been central to the broader normalisation of urban fragmentation as experienced in cities today.

The normalisation of gated communities

Since the 1990s, scholarly work about the gating phenomenon has flourished just as gated residential spaces have become a common housing choice. The fascination with these fortified enclaves has become part of popular culture. Since the 1990s, gated communities have become the setting for hundreds of movies and television series portraying segregation, social injustice, fear, and exclusion. In some cases, it is not only a setting but plays a major role in the plot. The Mexican-Spanish film La Zona (2007) by director Rodrigo Plá describes how residents of a gated community decide to take justice into their own hands after a couple of young boys break into the enclave. The British TV series Safe (2018) addresses the perception of security, demonstrating that living in an exclusive, highly securitised area does not guarantee immunity from crime.

This study examines the role of art as a crucible of capital and property during the First World War and constructs a large-scale historical narrative of European auctions held between 1910 and 1925. By combining sources such as auction reports, newspaper articles, caricatures, individual memoirs, and financial and legal documents with an analysis of art prices, this study allows for making new observations about the evolution of European art markets, their disruption by the events of the First World War, and their transnational entanglements. Far from focusing solely on reconstructing the collecting patterns of prominent individuals or shedding light on specific histories of appropriation and looting, this book explores broader cultural and social developments across the British, French, and German art markets and their milieus and also touches upon trade spheres such as Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia. While the First World War has often been neglected in scholarly studies as a phase of stagnation and stasis, this study shows that it had a disruptive impact on the art trade in the twentieth century and introduces a new transnational methodology for historical inquiries into cultural and artistic markets.