Gated communities are everywhere. From humble mobile home parks to upscale golf communities, they are exceedingly popular in the US, though they can be found on every single continent.

When I lived in Texas, I used to explore these residential developments. One of my favourites, Castlegate, named all its roads after English townships, like Toddington Lane, Norwich Drive, Egremont Place, Etonbury Avenue. A sort of Harry Potteresque fantasy land in faux classic colonial style populated by mostly 30-somethings pushing strollers. While exploring Castlegate, I discovered that there were gated communities inside the larger gated community. Extra security fences surrounded these smaller parcels, controlled by operable road barriers, sealing off about a dozen, usually larger homes.

Of course this rattled my understanding of enclaves, at least as I interpreted them through Foucault, since the enclave is supposed to provide a kind of petri dish environment in which to nurture richer forms of exchange and social invention. For Foucault, in order for the process of renewal and regeneration to function, the enclave had to provide space for indiscriminate horizontal interactions. An enclave inside an enclave suggests a more ominous social experiment, where the inhabitants of these gated communities could never be satisfied, as there would always be another ring of privilege to aspire to.

Thus, the gated community, rather than providing an enriching heterotopic platform for becoming, seems rather to simulate Dante’s rings of Inferno, where every ring is a dead end. When I imagine how gated communities have translated into social media platforms, I can’t help but think about hierarchies of order, with communities existing inside communities, instead of flat horizontal sweeps of interpersonal exchange. Access of course is a major question, as the codification of residential geography depends on what ‘text’ is operative. English country shire? Dungeons and Dragons? Southern Plantation? Italian Palladian? How have these scripts contaminated the platforms that are now guiding the on-line worlds? And who in the end has the privilege to access them?

*Antarctica has the most extreme gated communities.