City of Walls: Summary Chapter 7. FORTIFIED ENCLAVES: BUILDING UP WALLS AND CREATING A NEW PRIVATE ORDER

Brazil is not the only country with a lot of condominiums, in the USA it is also a quit common phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are some differences. In the USA the condominiums are not so often gated compared to Brazil, only twenty percent of them. In São Paulo the condominium are still more urban than suburban. [A tendency that is probably changing right know. I don’t have hard proof for it but when I see all these parcels on google earth it is plausible that the suburban condominium becomes more popular. I have to look at it. JvB] Another aspect that is different from the USA is that the houses are not patterned because the elite sees patterned houses as something for the working class. The house is a expression of you personality and needs a ‘individualized appearance.’ ‘Condominiums are never called “communities,” and they are never advertised as a type of housing that could enhance the value of doing things together. In fact, residents seem to resent deeply this idea of community.’
The famous condominium Alphaville ‘covered an urbanized area of 13 square kilometer and had a fixed population of around twenty thousand inhabitants. Its office center housed 360 enterprises, and commercial area had 600 enterprises. On average, 75,000 non residents passed through it daily. In 1989, 55.4 percent of the tax revenues of the city of Barueri came from Alphaville. Security is one of the main elements in its advertising and an obsession of all involved with it. Each residential area, office center, and commercial center hires its own security force to maintain internal order, and there is a common security force to take care of the public spaces (the avenues and even the highway connecting to São Paulo).
The condominiums provide all possible services you can image, like nannies, hairdresser, gardening, libraries, shops, ect. These services are done by poor people who often live in favelas close by. ‘The upper class fear contact and contamination by the poor, but they conitinue to depend on their low-class servants.
A lot of problems inside the condominium are caused by the children of the people who live there. They vandalize collective equipment, use drugs and drive without license. Especially the car accidents are a problem. Between March 1989 and January 1991, the police registered 646 car accidents occurred inside the residential areas, that is, inside the walls and on the private streets to which only residents and their visitors have access. The majority of accidents were caused by teenagers, the majority of victims were either children or teenagers playing in the streets (only one of the people who died was over eighteen).’
The problems with children in Alphaville is thought to be solved by ‘more love and attention, stronger families, and more controle. (…) To discuss the question in terms of public order or public responsibility is unheard-of. [This reminds me of what Hannah Arendt argues about the household and the political. JvB]
Teresa Caldeira sees the privatization of the public space as a new phenomenon. Brazilian society has always been unequal but the creation of private islands has grown stronger. Very interesting is that see things that the retreat of the elite from the public sphere is actually a retreat form the process of democratization. The reason for this is because the working classes, ‘through their social movements, were for the first time participating effectively in political life. There is a parallel to make with the US where the ‘flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s and to gated communities in the 1990s may be related to the expansion of citizenship rights of the black population and the incorporation into American society of an increased number of immigrants. In Europe, the increase of racism and of new patterns of segregation seem to be similarly associated with the expansion of citizenship rights to immigrants.
By giving a lot of examples of advertisement Caldeira shows that the concept of the condominium and the feeling of being unsafe is really something that is exploited by the real estate market.
People living in a closed and secured place do not see this as a negative thing. They also see their way of living as a form of ‘freedom’. [I think this is a very strange contradictory thing. JvB] ‘Interestingly, the people (…) never use arguments of privacy, individuality, or intimacy to justify their preferences. Morumbi residents seem to fear the spread of evil more than they value individualism.’ However, for the people who live in houses in Moóca this seems to be different. ‘The transformation of the house in a prison adds to the feeling of restriction and loss associated with the economic crisis and anguish about the social decay. The closed door is a strong metaphor.
But, the walls, fences, bars have also another function: “aesthetics of security”, as Caldeira calls it. The elements of security have become symbols of status. Security has also become part of the design of the house. ‘By the early 1990s the new “architecture of security” was making its way into the newspaper articles. This architecture creates explicit means of keeping away undesirables, especially the homeless.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 256-296.

The transformation of Public Space according to Jean Baudrillard

In the book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essay's on Postmodern Cultures Jean Baudrillard wrote the text The Ecstacy of Communication. What interest me professionally about this essay are the things he writes about in relation to 'public space':

“… body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Advertising in its new version – with is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocutor and the social virtues of communication – advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition. No longer limited to its traditional language, advertising organizes the architecture and realization of superobjects like Beaubourg and the Forum des Halles, and of future projects (e.g., Parc de la Villette) which are monuments (or anti-monuments) to advertising, not because they will be geared to consumption but because they are immediately proposed as an anticipated demonstration of the operation of culture, commodities, mass movement and social flux. It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections.”

Baudrillard describes here the consequences of the focus on commodities and advertising in the public space. Public space is no longer a stage for social and political life, as it was in history, but it has become a space of circulation, shopping and billboards and neon.