Abstract
This paper scrutinizes current processes of urban fragmentation, segregation, and exclusion that result from the increasing flows of capital in gated communities, walled-off condominiums, and similar exclusivist investment hubs in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Gated community-like developments are growing and spreading into new areas. Although not all of the walled projects offer all-inclusiveness, they are unanimously based on the pre-selection of specific categories of residents. Moreover, all-inclusive urban developments are taking on new and more encompassing forms, such as ‘gated cities’. Hence, socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion in the urban built environment are continuously transforming under the influence of investment capital (i.e., new urban investment flows and speculation), urbanistic concepts (e.g., different interpretations of safety and crime), and human mobilities. This paper builds on a comparison of empirical cases from Latin America and Africa to develop a qualitative framework of segregation indicators. In Latin America, gated communities have a long history, but exclusionary developments are changing in form, as well as in implications. In Africa, research on gated communities has particularly focused on South Africa (where they have a longer history), but exclusionary developments are spreading rapidly across the continent, and will influence future real estate development and land markets. Based on such complementary experiences, this paper grapples with the question of how these new all-inclusive developments influence the possibilities of achieving inclusive and sustainable urban transitions, as advocated in Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) and the New Urban Agenda.
Highlights
Urbanization is currently at the top of the development agenda
The challenge of Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) and the New Urban Agenda, especially in terms of the implementation of new policies, arguably lies in its contradictions: whereas the New Urban Agenda emphasizes renewed attention for urban planning in order to sustainably deal with future city growth, this message indirectly promotes top-down master planning, which can produce new forms of exclusionary space
As segregation—which is not limited to socially unequal societies—might induce inequality in direct and indirect ways, we have developed a qualitative framework of ‘segregation indicators’ based on five archetypical cases that are themselves based on the following parameters: location; actors; financial construction; target groups; and socio-economic, political, cultural and spatio-environmental effects
Summary
Urbanization is currently at the top of the development agenda. Based on Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11), ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’, the United Nations extended the SDG agenda by adopting the New Urban Agenda in 2016. One key challenge in the global south, where the urban poor are facing persistent exclusion from the possible benefits of urbanization, is making cities more inclusive [1] This is in part because large socio-spatial inequalities threaten sustainable urban futures in many ways. We touch upon issues of new investment flows and speculative urban investments in land and housing, in which a wide variety of actors are involved This topic is taking on renewed relevance in the context of population growth, land scarcity, and land commoditization. In Latin America, rapid growth and demographic transition took place in the second half of the twentieth century, while gated communities have a longer history These exclusionary developments are changing in form as well as in their implications. We do so to draw conclusions on the (possible) impact of project investment flows on the sustainability prospects for urban development in Latin America and Africa
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