Watching the CPL cricket on television the past few weeks, viewers might have been struck by the advertisements for various gated communities. A girl, leaving her sleek well-furnished home, jogs along impeccable sidewalks, passing impossibly green and manicured lawns and a nuclear family pushing a stroller.
Another, for a community nearby to the mirage that is Silica City, promises Florida-style living by the water with fine shopping and dining only a few minutes drive away. Happiness, serenity is just a deposit away. The digital renderings of these communities are sanitised visions of a perfect life and for the average Guyanese will always remain that. Instead they make you stick your hand in a bag and you pay a bundle for a house lot somewhere behind God’s back, sans electricity, sans paved road, let alone a sidewalk to jog along.
There are three types of living in Guyana right now. The traditional organic communities be they in the city or countryside which see a mix of classes, sometimes races, and can often incorporate neighbourhood shops and other small commercial ventures. They are noisy and can be annoying to live in but neighbours know each other and there is a strong sense of community. Then there are the massive planned housing schemes mostly on the capital’s periphery with long tracts of ticky-tacky houses and few common spaces for recreation and sport. Finally, there is the foreign import, the gated community catering to the well to do. This is set to proliferate as demand grows from international companies for their employees to live in protected areas and as Guyanese embrace the concept and prestige associated with such a lifestyle. These companies, especially in the oil sector, are focused on safety in their operations and for their employees. This extends to strict regulations on where and how they must reside. Of course expatriate workers are under no obligation to live among us and to appreciate our culture. They are here simply to work. However gated communities will naturally enforce stereotypes that can create suspicion and envy on either side.
The modern gated community started popping up in the American sunbelt in the late 1960s catering for retirees who wanted access to common amenities such as golf courses or country clubs. They soon expanded to middle class suburban subdivisions especially in Florida, with an emphasis on offering protection from crime but also from all other nuisances or outsiders, such as travelling salesmen or rowdy teenagers, the latter reflecting the culture of enforced silence in these somewhat sterile environment. It is primarily the fear of crime that has driven demand for gated communities even as real crime rates have been steadily dropping in America and that crime in the main impacts working class non-gated communities.
One can easily spot the parallels for Guyana. The rise of gated communities goes hand in hand with a proliferation of private security firms whose “officers” are advertised on one billboard on the way from the airport as being heavily armed like a militia. However Guyana is not a particularly dangerous place to live despite all the headlines. Murders and violent crimes overwhelmingly involve individuals known to each other. Even the home invasion often involves a relative with inside knowledge. Stranger on stranger crime mainly involves the “choke and rob” in the city which is a persistent threat that the police seem unable to control. Geographically, per capita, crime is most prevalent in rural communities and in mining areas, but for your suburban commuter Guyana is probably not more dangerous than many areas of the US. So the need for gated communities is not apparent.
There have been several studies on gated communities in particular in Florida which seems to be the depressing template for Guyana’s so called infrastructure development with its prioritisation of private motor cars, zero public transportation, and the mausoleum mall with its fast food franchises.
The justification for gated communities is really about personal safety. To be within its perimeters is to feel safe, to venture out is to expose oneself to crime. The effect is to reinforce the fear of the environment outside the safety of the walls, to view those around you with suspicion and to reduce empathy towards them and perhaps more seriously one’s concern for common spaces and social services.
A 1999 paper “Separate Places: Crime and Security in Gated Communities” by Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder observed that: “Many of these communities also privatise previous public responsibilities, such as police protection, parks and recreation, and a range of mundane civic functions from trash collection to street maintenance, leaving the poor and less well-to-do dependent on the ever-reduced services of city and county governments. This privatisation-in both senses is one of the more serious effects of gated communities on social equity and the broader community. The new developments create a private world that shares little with its neighbours or the larger political system… As citizens separate themselves into homogenous, independent cells, their ties to the greater polity and society become attenuated, increasing resistance to efforts to resolve municipal, let alone regional, problems.”
In the gated communities, many say they are taking care of themselves and have no desire to contribute to the common pool serving their neighbours in the rest of the city. In areas where gated communities are the norm, not the exception, this perspective has potentially severe impacts on the common welfare…When public services and even local governments are privatised, when the community of responsibility stops at the subdivision’s gates, what happens to the function and the very idea of a social and political democracy? In short, can this nation fulfil its social contract without social contact?…What is the measure of nationhood when the divisions between neighbourhoods require armed patrols and electric fences to keep out other citizens?”
Indeed and really this is where Guyana is headed: privatised communities, medicine, education, security for some and the rest left to the incompetence and cruelty of public governance. Like many other areas, gated communities also reflect the fact that there is no coherent urban planning but simply acquiescence to investors’ capital. Such communities are a reaction to what we have become as a society and also a contributor to what will likely become a dangerously divided nation.
