From Picket Fences to Iron Gates: Suburbanization and Gated Communities in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Seattle

Suburbanization has been a prominent urban process in the United States since the World War II. It has transformed American cities in profound ways in every single aspect of urban development; from population and wealth distributions, through political organization and affiliations, to the built environment. This paper investigates the link between gated communities and the process of suburbanization in the context of socio-economic inequality. As it has been shown time and again in the scholarly literature on suburbanization, the suburban neighborhoods in American cities have been traditionally more affluent and less diverse than central cities. The research on gated communities in the U.S. also shows that they are, on average, more affluent compared to other communities in terms of family income and housing values. Then are gated communities simply a new form of suburban communities? Is the gated community in fact a suburban community with the added element of security features? The paper investigates these questions based on segregation and spatial analyses. The research contributes to the long line of studies on suburbanization, gating and the larger issues of urban inequality.