Gated communities as the factor of territorial segregation in the city regions

Abstract

CEE countries are experiencing post-socialist transformations. The new ideas that are coming from the Western part of Europe or USA are kindly welcomed in the former socialist countries. With these new ideas, in the CEE countries has appeared a new phenomenon – gated communities (GC) – as the new-style residential settlements that become the symbols of territorial segregation. This phenomenon in Lithuania is not so often, but during the last years the number of such neighbourhoods has increased and currently we count around 30 GCs in our country. In public and academic literature that is analysed and presented in this article, the appearance of such territorial structures in the cities and their regions is considered controversially. On the one hand, it is pointed out that these settlements create a positive atmosphere, economic value, social infrastructure for both: settlement residents and also for the neighbourhoods where they are located. On the other side stand the opponents of GCs who underline that these settlements segregate the society and they provide with the list of negative effects of these gated settlements again for both: GC residents and the ones who are left “outside the wall”.
The main questions that are raised in our research are the following: does the emergence of gated communities influence the segregation in the cities/city regions? How do the GCs affect the residents of these settlements and the society that is left “beyond the wall”?