Fortified Enclaves / Teresa P. R. Caldeira

A city was used to be a public space, and open and spacious for everyone in the past. However, the author warns that some cities in the world today has been created a new pattern of segregation and made inequality life to citizens by lots factors. In the case of Sao Paulo, Middle and upper classes are able to provide their privatized, enclosed and personal walls which she calls “Fortified Enclaves”, and others can not. Fortified enclaves simply embossed the marginal line between rich and poor. As quote by the author,

“….San Paulo is today a city of walls. Physical barriers have been constructed everywhere – around houses, apartment buildings, parks, squares, office complexes, and schools. Apartment buildings and houses that used to be connected to the street by gardens are now everywhere separated by high fences and walls and guarded by electronic devices and armed security men”.(Caldiera, “Fortified Enclaves”:87).

Enclave is a sign of the boundary from a public street. In the highly crime country, security is important that it may prevent from all poor people who walk on the street by foot to enter their private enclaves. She assumes that the adaptation of environmental issues that the cities have held made people to be divided by such social distance and inequality. As a result, fortified enclave became a symbol of homogeneous status which middle and upper class have held.

There is an antinomy between servants and the middle and upper class people in the close condominium case. The more middle and upper class people depend on service from servant, closer their relationship which will causes probably bad effect to them, which they do want to avoid. In sum, the close condominiums are isolated from city. Developers emphasized in ads that the location of the condominiums in where close to “nature”. Segregated condominiums with exclusive security can prevent or protect people from crime. In contrast, they will take away harmony, happiness even freedom from them. In the case of Los Angels, it is much fragmented and called as “peripheral urbanization” compared with San Paulo. However, still both cases are defensible which provides spatial segregation, social inequalities and isolation on their enclaves. The rich people in Morumbi physically provides the high walls, iron fences and armed guard, such the way of security procedure is quite different the way of people live in Los Angels. They mostly put electronic alarms whose show much respects to public streets.

Thus, fortified enclave will provide continuously not only visible walls, but also inflexible separation which embeds to the people to label different social groups.