Islands of Prestige,Gated Ghettos,and Nonurban Lifestyles in Puerto Rico

Gates in Puerto Rico

Residential gates began to be erected in Puerto Rico in the mid-1980s as typically private communities sought relief from crime. In contrast to the situation in the United States, gates were not limited to new planned developments but were constructed in subdivisions that had been built as open residential areas. In May 1987, Law No. 21, titled the Ley de Cierre (Closing Law), made it possible for municipalities to grant permits restricting public access and traffic to developments, streets, subdivisions, pedestrian walkways, and public and private residential communities via the establishment of infrastructure that would limit access to the area. ¹ The law provided the opportunity for many residential developments that had been designed and built for public access to privatize and “control” their previously public spaces.

A few years later, in 1993, a policy called Operation Centurion, popularly known as mano dura contra el crimen (Strong Arm against Crime), focused on gating as the prime intervention for addressing crime. The policy had a dual purpose: to reduce crime on the island and to activate “a social rebuilding model” for public housing. The most crime-prone public housing projects were to undergo a radical transformation beginning with a dawn raid and occupation by the National Guard. The occupation was to end with the construction of a temporary and then a permanent gate around the public housing project. Thus, in the same way that the private residential areas sealed themselves off from their neighbors by building perimeter walls topped with razor wire and erecting guardhouses or gates that controlled access to these communities (Simon, 1997a; 1997b), the island’s approach to fighting crime became erecting gates and walls and privatizing public residential spaces. Eighty-two projects out of a total of 321 public housing developments were gated under this policy.

Four Gated Communities in Ponce

To examine the differences between public and private residential gated communities, I conducted 20 focus groups, representing a total of 65 households, in four adjacent residential communities in the southern city of Ponce in 2003 and 2004. The four communities included two public housing projects, Gándara and Dr. Pila, and two private housing developments, Extensión Alhambra and Alhambra, one of each of which was gated.

Gándara is a public housing community of 230 units. Gándara is not gated, and its residents for the most part disapprove of building a gate. They think that the neighborhood would look unattractive with gates and that gates would suggest that the neighborhood was bad. One resident explained: “They have been wanting to close it, the residents themselves, but then they said no, because when they saw the areas of Dr. Pila [a nearby public housing project], instead of improving it got worse, because it’s a tourist area. It’s going to be ugly. They are going to say, ‘Ponce is really bad, because look at how they have it all closed.’”

Dr. Pila is a public housing project of over 1,000 units that was gated in 1993 under the mano dura policy. Residents compared their community to a prison. As one of them put it, “It’s . . . all blocked, it’s as if we were all locked up. They have us with gates on every side.” The gates have effectively controlled traffic. One resident explains that “before, there were four entrances. Now there is only one entrance and one exit.” In addition to a peripheral fence, internal fences surround clusters of buildings. Each cluster has only one vehicular and pedestrian entry point. These internal fences have made the community difficult to walk and limited residents’ access to their neighbors. One resident complained about them as follows: “They have to be removed, because you have to go a long way around. There are five buildings with a fence, and then five more buildings, and everything is very far. I don’t like it.” Another resident effectively describes how the internal gates impede community-making practices “for no good reason”: “Before, I would go to my sister’s house in a moment, directly. Now I have to go around.”

The gates have not only interfered with contact inside but have effectively barred contact with outsiders. Prior to the fence, there was a major vehicular thoroughfare that crossed the community from north to south. With the intervention the north part of the avenue was blocked to vehicular traffic and public transportation was rerouted around the development. Many residents strongly oppose the gate and the controlled access, calling it “a mess.” A few would approve of a gate and a controlled access that worked differently, with a private guard or monitoring of those who enter through the use of an identification sticker or a beeper as the gating was originally described. The existing gate reminds residents of its function; it is meant to imprison them, to limit their relationship to others in the community and to the wider public, and to create a distinction and psychological pressures. One resident concluded that the gates were intended “to close the public housing project and lock us up as if we were animals. Aside from putting the big one outside, they divide us inside, too, little animals divided by sections.”

Extensión Alhambra, an upper-middle-class community of some 50 single-family homes, was built as an open-access community. However, its location between two public housing sites is one of the reasons the neighbors organized in the 1990s and built an electronic gate. Their gate is self-imposed, and residents feel that it has improved safety in the community.

Alhambra is one of the first suburban neighborhoods built in Ponce for the wealthy. Consisting of about 70 large single-family homes of Spanish colonial style, the neighborhood continues to house the cultural and economic elite of the city. However, it has not been retrofitted with gates or controlled-access infrastructure. The inability to build a peripheral gate is perceived to have changed the architecture of the homes and the character of the neighborhood as many residents have built fortresses around their individual homes.

Public and Private Gates and their Meanings

The gated residential communities of Puerto Rico shape the way community is perceived and experienced. Social psychologists and urban planners have undertaken the foundational work of outlining how space is perceived and understood by social subjects (Lynch, 1960; Tolman, 1948). Edward C. Tolman’s experimental research with rats suggested that people create cognitive maps or images of their surroundings that are not merely a product of stimulus-response processes. Kevin Lynch’s work specified the qualities of space and the built environment that are managed by actors in creating cognitive maps and navigating space and suggested that spatial images are a reciprocal process between the observer and the city. “The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer—with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes—selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees” (Lynch, 1960: 6). Lynch extends a seemingly individual concept of cognitive mapping to the group level, arguing that although these images are individual there is consensus among members of a group. He calls these images “public images” and defines them as “common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants: areas of agreement which might be expected to appear in the interaction of a single physical reality, a common culture, and a basic physiological nature” (7). Gerald Suttles’s (1972) work expands Tolman’s and Lynch’s individual cognitive mapping concepts by focusing on a collective version of cognitive mapping. He suggests that people interpret the neighborhood environment in order to inform their territorial organization and develop notions of community. He proposes that the city has two forms that inform each other: the physical form and “the cognitive map which residents have for describing, not only what their city is like, but what they think it ought to be like” (Suttles, 1972: 22). These maps, according to Suttles, are used by residents to navigate the city, and “they provide a final solution to decision making where there are often no other clear cutoff points for determining how far social contacts should go” (22). Suttles fails to detail the “physical form,” but Lynch proposes that there are qualities—in shape, color, or arrangement—that make certain objects stand out, that provide a stronger image for those who experience the object. These qualities give objects what he termed “imageability,” “visibility,” or “legibility” and lead to powerfully structured images. Relying on the cognitive-mapping tradition, I explore the “public images” of public and private gates and elucidate how they inform and maintain distinctions among communities. Through this process, the built environment is both a direct and a socially mediated agent—and, for policy purposes, one that can be controlled—in shaping urban segregation.

With the gate, private housing became even more prestigious and exclusive while the militarized, gated public housing turned the already stigmatized but now relatively harmless open area into a ghetto. These communities can be classified as (1) free versus controlled, (2) safe versus insecure, (3) public versus private, and (4) poor versus rich on the basis of the condition of their gates.

In private housing, the gate is seen as a positive thing. The elaborate, well-kept, and landscaped gate denotes the safety, prestige, and value of the neighborhood. It effectively advertises class position and lifestyle. In contrast, the gate of a public housing project is a warning sign to stay away, suggesting danger. The fence that surrounds a public housing project is seen as creating a barrier to movement, access, and liberty. The residents of gated public housing experience their environment as one that is externally controlled and full of limitations. They emphasized the difference between private and public housing as being that in private residential areas the gating was “private” while the in public housing the gating was “controlled.” Public housing residents point to the efforts made by residents of private housing to separate themselves and mark the two environments as different. It is clear to them that the private gating is an attempt to protect residents against them. While the public housing gates serve as liberty inhibitors, the private gates signify the freedom of those who have the legal right to defend (Anderson, 1990; Suttles, 1972) and control access to their communities.

Islands of Prestige and Gated Ghettos

The meanings of gates in Puerto Rico contain two brands of residential lifestyle. In one, the private gardens of the elite are at stake; in the other, poverty is increasingly contained and controlled.

In the private gated community of Extensión Alhambra, a resident demonstrated the lifestyle being protected by the gate, showing me pictures of her many plants. While the scholarly and popular discourse deployed about gates is one of crime, violence, security, and threat, what was being protected was something far more subtle. The things that defined residents’ lives were not things of great value; cars, windows, property damage were never mentioned as needing protection. And although a few personal attacks and holdups at gunpoint were described, the residents’ discourse revolved around smaller things. In explaining the need for the gates, many residents referred to the protection of gardens. The goal was to keep the community “safe,” but “attractive” and “safe” were often synonymous. For example, one resident described the threat of horses’ from the public housing project running into their yards and defecating:

This was a very pretty area and everybody had beautiful gardens, but we were the playground of the kids who had horses in Gándara. We would wake up and the horses would be here making number one and number two on the grass. You couldn’t say anything, so we had to close. Because of that and the robberies . . . the garden hoses, the skateboards. They stole two plant pots from in front of my neighbor’s house. That doesn’t make the place attractive.

Another also mentioned the theft of flowers, plants, and fruits: “They took all the orchids. . . . They come into your yard to take the limes, the mangoes, the avocados. . . . Then, very tranquil, because you see them and scream at them and they say, ‘Lady, wait, I want to take a mango’ or tell you that the lady next door gave them permission. It’s constant nonsense.” The talk about flowers was an indication of the lifestyle that was being protected. Built environments had become the venue for social wars.

Living behind the gate in Dr. Pila is very different. This gate is meant to control those inside. The gate increased external controls and replaced the community’s grassroots organizing with management that is actively resisted and seen as being unjust and biased. The control is also formalized in the form of limited mobility within the project and limited access to other parts of the city. One resident mentioned the inability to go trick-or-treating in the private communities for Halloween. Many expressed feelings of isolation and stigma. In fact, the gate has created a two-tier hierarchy among the poor in which communities that are not gated are perceived as “better” than those that are. As one resident of an ungated public housing project explained, her rationale for not wanting gates in her community was that someone driving by a public housing project and seeing the gates would say that it was a “bad” place. Another resident of the same public housing project explained that if it were gated it would be like Dr. Pila, which in his eyes was worse instead of better with the gates.

The gates have created a new ghetto that parallels the spatialized panoptic power structure of the prison complex identified by Foucault (1977). Gates embody and convey social meanings and reinforce distinctive community identities and lifestyles. The ghetto is an isolated poor community in a bounded location. As Wacquant (2004: 129) puts it, “a ghetto is a social-organizational device composed of four elements (stigma, constraint, spatial confinement, and institutional encasement).” Uses of space such as the construction of Le Corbusier’s clustered high-rise buildings to serve a poor or underclass community, the building of highways, and the razing of economically disadvantaged but stable communities have been pinpointed as dynamics that have an impact on communities’ derailment into ghetto-hood (Drake and Cayton, 1945; DuBois, 1996 [1899]; Massey and Denton, 1993; Venkatesh, 2000; Wilson, 1979; 1987; 1996). The emergence of the gate as an intervention to be applied to poor communities is a new development in the ghettoization of communities. The mano dura policy reactivated a process of ghettoization of public housing communities in Puerto Rico by labeling them as dangerous, dark, dystopian places that needed to be controlled.

In this way, design, space, and the built environment play a role in communities’ becoming stigmatized and increasingly segregated. In Puerto Rico public housing complexes have become places to be avoided. The new ghetto is characterized by visible, physical, impermeable walls. These new walls reorganize our knowledge about the ghetto in three ways:

Thus the gates have formalized the metaphor of the prison in public housing, producing monitored and controlled home spaces for public housing residents and handing control over the city to private communities.

Nonurban Life in the City

Spatial politics in Puerto Rico has given rise to a new form of the city. Gates corral unequal urban landscapes and preserve unequal structures of home and community. They fix neighborhood identities and cement social boundaries. This segmentation has robbed city life of the spontaneous and diverse contacts that it once provided. Life in Puerto Rican cities is no longer urban.

The streets between these communities are deserted, and opportunities for everyday personal contact have disappeared. One public housing resident articulated the extreme segregation of the project due to the gates: “Everyone came by here because Alcázar Avenue was long. When they closed it, they closed Dr. Pila from every side.” The gates have exacerbated the deep separation between classes in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Residents of the private housing developments inhabit completely different social universes: while private neighborhood residents drive their cars to professional jobs or to buy groceries in particular supermarkets or attend local social and sports clubs, public housing project residents walk their children to school, walk or ride bikes to work, take public transportation to the supermarket or welfare appointments, or hang around the neighborhood. Residents of private communities report having circles of interaction consistent with their own lifestyles and way of life and “the same aspirations, the same way of life. We like the same topics. We frequent the same places, the same supermarkets, the same stores.” In contrast, the familial and social contacts of public housing residents tend to be located in other public housing sites and other working-class communities: “Coming from a public housing project, we’re part of the public housing projects. They see us as like them. We can knock at any door of a public housing project and they will open it. If I go to Alhambra and knock on the door, they aren’t going to open it.”

The gates, then, have congealed the separation; they have become actual closed doors stopping traffic and contact. They have created islands of the Puerto Rican experience that do not relate to each other. William Julius Wilson (1987) argued that the “truly disadvantaged” were those who had been abandoned in the inner city with no connection to the outside. Something that is not noted, however, and that is clearly evident in Puerto Rico’s housing is the attainment of a class identity that is largely defined by the housing community one lives in. The cohesion of poverty is derived from living in these purposeful communities, which have a beginning and an end, a name, and for many an identity. The gates are the membranes of these identities. Thus, gated communities in Puerto Rico are a blueprint, a spatial organizational structure for the class structure of the island. And this nomenclature of class defines interactions in the city, even beyond the immediate spatial environment of the communities.

One resident of Extensión Alhambra described the gate as creating much-needed “ecological harmony.” What she meant by this seemed to be something that permitted her to feel safe and function in her everyday life. This is another version of “good fences make good neighbors,” emphasizing the need for boundary affirmation. Frederick Barth (1969) described the work of the boundary as giving people clarity as to where they stood and helping them to navigate everyday cultural differences. He also suggested that conflict happened across weak boundaries that failed to prevent contact. In Puerto Rico today, the neighborhood is more important than the nation, the state, or the city.

Puerto Rico’s example can be used to talk about nonurban lifestyles in which gates signal the islands that are important for our survival. The early urban sociologist Louis Wirth (1938: 8) defined the city as “a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of heterogeneous individuals” of segmented character that requires control. It is a system of social organization with a structure, institutions, and social relationships in which the family is less important, income and status groups are sharply differentiated, and individuality is incompetent. Attitudes, ideas, and personalities are involved in collective behavior and subject to social control. In the city, Wirth suggested, secondary, nonfamilial relationships, as opposed to primary family relationships, predominate, and competition and formal control replace kinship. Park (1915) also suggested that the city destroys neighborhoods’ intimacy by making formal overarching structures and laws more salient. He emphasized that the modern city was for the market and vocational types took precedence over family. This led to greater inequality. The community of interest took precedence over sentiment and habit.

The nonurban city formalizes physical structures of social control that increasingly segment but also reduce secondary contacts and preserve primary ones. Thus, neighbors no longer encounter the street and each other, and the family has become the locus of social life. Social control is exercised at a very low level, and the nation and the city become less and less important.

Iris Marion Young (1990) mourns the exclusionary trends of competitive individualism and the quest for sameness in the name of community that have taken over the city. Puerto Rico’s community gates represent this move toward exclusion. Asked about strategies for moving away from exclusion and toward integration in the nonurban cities of the new millennium, virtually the only public housing resident willing to entertain alternatives suggested that the municipality arrange social activities that would bring the private and public housing communities together. In an era in which people “bowl alone” (Putnam, 2000), the suggestion seems naïve. It signals the death of the “social” in the nonurban city.

Puerto Rico’s twentieth-century push for housing was meant to provide homes for individuals as well as for communities. The social experiment placed public and private homes side by side in a quest for social integration. The gated home, however, has concretized and formalized urban inequality. Gated housing today means exclusion and division and brands communities and families as inherently different, launching Puerto Rico as a modern nonurban Caribbean society.