Gated Communities of the Mind
Securing the suburban dream
Federico Perelmuter
As a child I dreamt of dying a violent death. I feared intruders would break into my room through the rectangular plate glass window above my bed. In sleep, I faced toward that window because I felt that my reaction time against any invasion would be better than if I faced away. I was five then, and my room was on the second floor of my family home, which was in a gated community in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. Fear was the one thing I should not have felt, considering the guards at the entrance and the barbed wire fence, and how much of life in that place was geared around our protection from the outside, from where those intruders came. My parents, both Buenos Aires natives, left the city when I was an infant in search of “peace,” safety, calm. The suburban dream.
My nightmares would’ve seemed absurd misinterpretations of my parents’ dream, but as a child I grew to equate walls with safety and the outside with danger. Fences and gates were a constant reminder of the threats awaiting us out there, an armed metaphor for our vulnerability and the rapacity of the beyond. Though I did not understand it at the time, the walls reflected my parents’ fears when leaving the city as much as they anticipated the dangers around us. I want to believe that the walls, in one way, were incidental to the fantasy, a kind of begrudging necessity, but this would not altogether explain my nightmares.
For many, the walls became the dream itself, a container for fear and resentment. For my parents, who came of age in the city, enclosure resolved a vulnerability felt walking Buenos Aires’ streets. The neoliberal-on-steroids policies of the 90s had split Argentine society into “winners”—the few, major capitalists and multinational or financial sector employees—and “losers,” i.e. everyone else, in the terms of sociologist Maristella Svampa’s 2001 book about gated communities, Los que ganaron [The winners]. The 90s were the first boomtime for Argentina’s gated communities, partially because loose financial regulations meant foreign capital firms could buy land, lot it, throw up a fence and a gate, and resell for a profit. Meanwhile, in 2001, the worst economic meltdown in Argentina’s crisis-ridden history that left around sixty six percent of Argentina’s population living in poverty, with almost twenty-two percent unemployment. Crime, particularly armed robberies and break-ins, skyrocketed from already high levels following a decade-plus of austerity. Fear spread.
In response, and assisted by their socioeconomic success, the “winners” fled to the cages built and sold especially for them. Invisible to my parents, the built environment around me in which I was raised materialized only their terror. Guards, fences, and walls responded more to their sense of urban endangerment than the concrete risks of an admittedly not-very-safe metropolitan area. The matter had never been pragmatic, concerned with minimizing the threat of crime or violence, but aesthetic: how to realize the urban escapees’ dream of security? What did safety look like, and would it sell?
“I want to believe that the walls, in one way, were incidental to the fantasy, a kind of begrudging necessity, but this would not altogether explain my nightmares.”
By early adolescence, having outgrown the nightmares, I understood that my home was fucked, a ghetto for the rich and well-to-do. My parents always spoke ill of the city, which they believed had become ever more dangerous and was no longer the best place to raise children. In a way, they were right: our middle-sized gated community had around 140 houses organized in two long streets finishing in roundabouts and some cross streets. There was a kindergarten, afterschool activities, sports teams and lots of kids my age, though I befriended none. Amenities, concentrated on one end, include a small turf field, two tennis courts, a small playground, a building with an indoor pool, gym, and restaurant, a multipurpose gathering hall, and a shack that was once a kindergarten/barbershop. Our backyard was large, with a pool, and carefully maintained green spaces abounded. If you wanted your children to grow up close to “nature” without leaving Buenos Aires altogether, this was it, only a thirty-to-forty-minute drive away from the city and as safe as one could be from street crime.
Life was good there. We were pretty much the only Jews, which is never ideal, but otherwise everyone looked like us, shared our habits and preferences. A gated community guarantees homogeneity among inhabitants: no undesirables inside the fence. I spent my teenage years vocally resenting my parents, who had poured their life savings into our family home, for isolating me, casting me to a place I found so morally onerous. They argued, rightly, that I should thank my lucky stars to grow up in such a peaceful environment, with no fear and bright green trees swaying with each stormy gust.
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The entrance to our gated community is around three minutes away from the highway, down a street that was once empty and now bustles with shopping centers, office blocks, supermarkets and schools, all catered to the people who live in the area. We are also close to the self-described oldest country club in Argentina, founded in the 1930s. Since my family moved in the early 2000s, other communities have surrounded ours. The gates feature two entrances on either side of a central office, a standard design: one entrance for visitors—whose personal and vehicular information the guards will note, before searching the car’s trunk and calling the resident who invited them in for clearance—and another for “members.” Owners have key cards, though face recognition will be implemented in the coming months. Guards patrol the inner streets constantly in carts while an intricate camera system supervises the common areas.
These rituals of surveillance are fairly standardized across gated communities, and owners know they’re rather flimsy. Guards are often blamed for break-ins and rotated among gated communities. In fact, guards (much like police beyond the gates) are often held responsible for enforcing the guidelines that rule life inside the walls, even though that is not their job; when an owner is dissatisfied with their intervention in whatever petty dispute, the guard gets the axe. Unlike walls and fences, guards are people, and though they can be employed and paid shit wages, they cannot be owned. What is not owned cannot be trusted—this, too, is a rule of life inside the gates.
Our community’s aesthetic, as is the case for many in Pilar, resembles what I’d describe as equestrian chic, reminiscent of polo and hose-racing, English aristocratic sports that the wealthy upper crust who founded the 1930s country clubs practiced. In fact, Pilar was a hotspot for horse breeding until the 80s. Gated communities built in the 90s and thereafter were modeled after these “English style” country clubs but populated mostly by city-dwelling petit bourgeois who, go figure!, didn’t care for horses. The communities were designed to resemble an idealized version of American suburbia—regular, tightly controlled, peaceful, treelined and safe for children, not to mention car-accessible only. American suburbia itself was, ultimately, a cheap middle-class replica of the suburbs that arose in 18th century England. Argentina’s upper classes lust for escape: not just from cities but often from the country altogether, which they feel (not altogether incorrectly) wretchedly marginal. The “winners,” convinced that they are in fact the “losers,” opted for performing middle class in the US rather than their real life of wealth in Argentina. If they can’t have exit, they’ll take the next best thing, which is near-total enclosure.
Of course, the vision of a pure interior, life apart from the barbarians, is bullshit. A veritable army of employees sustains a frisson of perfection meant as much to entice outsiders (i.e., potential buyers) as to reassure residents of their idyl. Anthropologist Ricardo Greene studied Nordelta, which is not so much a gated community as a massive privatized city, a gated compound composed of dozens of smaller subcommunities built on former swampland and run by a corporation. Around forty thousand people live there, and its particularly beloved by soccer players, celebrities, and drug traffickers, all of whom enjoy the privacy. Begun in present form in the late 90s, the megaurbanization—as its developer, also founder and president of Argentina’s largest private art museum, called it—had an even more ambitious offer: with schools and a mall inside Nordelta’s premises, the need to leave would be altogether eradicated. That did not quite come to fruition, and as Greene documents, the relationship between the thousands of wealthy, secluded Nordelta residents and the local community that predates the compound remains tense. Scandals break out frequently, and in recent years have included from major tax evasion to smuggling of housemaids past guards in the trunks of cars during COVID isolation and a system of quasi-apartheid on buses, which are privately owned and which “members” refuse to share with workers.
“Of course, the vision of a pure interior, life apart from the barbarians, is bullshit. ”
Greene argues that gated communities like Nordelta are “part of the long genealogy of white subjectivity in Argentina,” not unlike the frontier outposts of the settler-colonial era. What he calls an “ethics of comfort” underlies Nordelta and the gated community as a whole, “forms of conduct and self-discipline that seek to avoid stressful and potentially dangerous experiences, such as those arising from interclass encounters.” The gated community, he says, is “a sort of immunological womb,” fragile but supposedly safe from difference qua infection. Comfort, of course, is more goal than fact. The gated community is not real, but a reified desire held together by its systems of containment—what urban theorist Lewis Mumford famously termed “a collective attempt to live a private life” rooted in the capital-R Romantic belief in childhood as a space of sanctified innocence. Nightmares unveiled the underside of my youth, spent in what amounts to an idealized, edified projection of the ideal childhood. Between utopia and reality blossomed my fear.
Among the gated community’s secrets, hidden from view yet acutely present to its residents, are the “undeveloped,” interstitial sectors between communities, the barbarians at the gates. The two are inseparable, conjoined at the gated community’s very origin. In the 1970s, Argentina’s most politically turbulent decade, the upperclass, longing to get away from the upheaval, began converting their weekend homes at country clubs into full-time residences, which was not legal at the time. A 1977 law, decreed under the genocidal dictatorship that seized power in 1976 and “disappeared” around thirty thousand people, legalized that practice in Buenos Aires province and laid the groundwork for the expansion of gated communities. The same law, under the guise of “ecological concern,” banned “loteo popular,” a century-old practice that had enabled working-class people to acquire non-urbanized land in suburban Buenos Aires through years of monthly payments. Though the arrival of necessary utilities took years, their eventual delivery allowed workers access to empty land in the outskirts of Buenos Aires and the generational security of property.
Unfortunately, the neoliberal policies of 1990s Argentina radicalized already drastic wealth inequality and increased the prevalence of informal labor and poverty, eroding the integrationist goals of the preexisting social and economic order. Local and foreign investors offered cheap land that promised to increase in value as the areas grew. “Winners,” unreliant on a debilitated welfare state, began to flee Buenos Aires, though the city remained the most desirable residence. Developers marketed the new gated communities by appealing to family life, particularly aiming for recent parents and their nostalgia for the bygone, “safe” city childhood. Inhabitant numbers ballooned, doubling yearly in the 90s, and despite a slowdown after 2001, about one hundred and twenty-five thousand people lived in gated communities around Buenos Aires in 2005. Current numbers are harder to find, but the geographer Andrés Barsky estimated their population at around half a million.
The boom remade Pilar and Tigre, as municipalities designed regulations to entice developers and buyers by lowering taxes, hoping that doing so would generate newfound economic possibilities for the districts. Because each gated community charges dues, from which they privately contract services typically provided by the state—garbage collection, lighting, common space upkeep—many have been reluctant to pay their (already lowered) local taxes. Enclosure involves abstraction: they don’t live in the “conurbano,” the Buenos Aires metropolitan area associated with crime, poverty, and farming, but in some lofty abstract “privatopia,” to cite Evan McKenzie’s famous description. Local municipalities have thus not benefited much from the developments and their increased tax bases.
Moreover, each house in a gated community creates numerous jobs—most obviously security guards and maids and, when being built, construction workers, but also gardeners, pool cleaners, electricians, etcetera. This process generated an underclass of precarious, impoverished workers, mostly part-time and paid under-the-table, who moved to the area from other parts of Argentina and poorer neighboring countries, Bolivia and Paraguay especially, in pursuit of the abundant available work. Because loteo popular no longer exists, these migrants (unlike we wealthy migrants) erected emergency settlements, tin-house slums called villas with little public infrastructure, if any. They fill the interstices between gated communities and are in permanent danger of displacement, often to erect a new gated community where its future workers once lived. Ironically, gated community developers are prone to tax avoidance: the governor of Buenos Aires province likened some gated communities to “practically occupied land.” Perceiving themselves surrounded by racialized threats—the very kind they left the city to avoid!—the security theater of gated communities only grows more strict, their obsession with purity more drastic. Every utopia hides an apocalypse, every dream a nightmare.
Suburbs in general, and gated communities in particular, materialize what Robert Fishman called “bourgeois utopias.” They arose as capitalism separated labor from the home, exchanging the workshop for the factory. England’s nascent industrial bourgeoisie sought to escape an unsafe city polluted by a ballooning proletariat and the fumes of their own sweatshops. For Mumford, the Romantic suburb was concerned with a return to childhood innocence and nostalgic Wordsworthian “tranquility.” Above all else was the illusion of individuality and Crusoe-like independence sustained by the establishment of a nuclear family “untainted by thoughts of child labor, foul air, prostitution.” That arrangement lives on in Pilar: no single parents, and as far as I know no divorcés, lived in my gated community. Work transpired in the city, while life happened in the suburbs. Suburban homes grew into spacious enclaves of quietly regimented individualism, of strict family life, where space was not only a marker of class but a reminder of restraint.
The paradox of a collective individualism underlies any understanding of gated communities such as mine, and particularly of the subjectivities they produce. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud traces this precise disjuncture by beginning with what Romain Rolland described as the “oceanic” ground of religious feeling, a “sensation of eternity” and “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” Freud, ever the Enlightened Jew, cannot find such a feeling in himself, but takes the opportunity to theorize the individual’s relationship to collectivity, i.e. the titular civilization. Most succinctly, he posits a pleasure principle, the “relentless narcissism” of a near-animal desire for satisfaction and the avoidance of discomfort through which individuality first arises. To this he opposes a “reality principle,” a “tendency ... to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of ... unpleasure.” This disjuncture is, for Freud, at the core of early development, and as such works as a cornerstone of our individuality.
Freud extends this relationship to communities, which are similarly built upon “a renunciation of instinctual satisfaction.” The superego is the internalized manifestation of this abdication, and Freud describes the tension between the selfish ego and civilizing superego as “guilt,” insofar as our desires reveal themselves to us as antisocial or otherwise counter to preestablished norms of collective life. Guilt, put differently, is a “topographical variety of anxiety,” an uneasiness born at the site where ego and superego counter each other, where our inner world cannot be reconciled with our social environment. Freud suggests that as communities widen and grow in complexity, guilt intensifies as the superego’s task becomes more demanding. I suspect that guilt lies at the core of the formation of gated communities, and even explains my nightmares as not just fearful but, well, culpable.
Nothing could be more overwhelming and socially complex than a cosmopolitan metropolis like Buenos Aires, more expansive by the day and always hurtling toward mass upheaval. With what Svampa called the “integrationist” urban policy of the prior half-century undone, the racialized poor and working class clamoring for their rights “invaded” Buenos Aires in 2001, an event the writer and journalist María Moreno called “The Buenos Aires Commune.” “Invasion” is, in fact, a particularly sensitive subject for a city invaded first by the English in the early nineteenth century, an event that kickstarted Argentine independence. In 1945, the then Minister of Labor and Social Welfare Juan Domingo Perón’s working class supporters spontaneously flooded the posh city center, who dipped their feet in the fountains to ease the summer heat and demanded his release from political imprisonment. This moment founded the defining Argentine political movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Peronism, with its devotion to trade unions and the working class.
“I suspect that guilt lies at the core of the formation of gated communities, and even explains my nightmares as not just fearful but, well, culpable. ”
Those who, in 2001, did not regard themselves as part of “the people” taking the streets felt invaded as a radically expanded social environment turned dangerous and the literally repressed subaltern returned. Incapable of reconciling the demands of the invaders into their own superegoic map—solidified in an idealized and sheltered, middle or upper-middle class childhood—many took the Crusoeian alternative, an escape from reality. Freud, unsurprisingly, thought such forms of escape were illusions born of weakness: “whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon [the hermit’s] path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him.” For Mumford, escapist suburbia “was in effect a confession that the proud philistines of the period had neither the intellectual penetration to analyze their condition nor the courage and the imagination to transform it. The suburb was a pharisaic way of passing by on the other side: leaving the civic organism itself in the gutter.” In the early 00s and to this day, the gated community also offered a path away from the culpable dissonance of living in a city taken over, no longer their own.
Perceiving themselves dispossessed—though not remotely so materially—the only path toward reconciliation was nostalgia for the enclosures of childhood. Perhaps living in an entirely privatized environment helps cathect the loss of a city previously held, if not owned. Such resolution does not last: the fear—hidden in dreamy guise—pervading every inch of the gated community walls, the fear that characterized my childhood, demonstrates the precarity of that arrangement. Every child fears the unknown, but to be raised behind walls, crossing a guarded border every day, programs your mind to revere the stark difference between inside and outside. The nightmares indicated not only a fear of death with which I have yet to reckon entirely, but the hidden discomfort of living in a Manichean world, in constant danger, in an enclosure constantly at the edge of collapse. A world to which I return often, though now as a visitor, but not an outsider.