Landscape of Power/Exclusion

 Landscape of Power/Exclusion- Brooke Steed 

     The idea of power is present in every aspect of life. In society, some people are always going to hold powers over others for a variety of reasons. Through this power, different landscapes can appear. One everyday example of a power landscape is a gated community. The definition of a power landscape is one that deliberately separates two groups of people, sometimes by a physical barrier. A gated community is a perfect example of this. There is quite literally a gate that separates the houses in that neighborhood from all of the houses around it. Typically, power does come with income, and a gated community is no exception to this. Usually, the houses in gated communities are more expensive, typically larger than a home outside of the gated community, and you have to be wealthier to live in the gated community. Because of this, those people typically hold more power over the less wealthy families that live outside the gated community, and that gate acts as a physical barrier between the two. There are also gated communities for poor families, which have the same affect but in reverse. They are designed to keep all of the low-income, which correlates to low power, families inside the gates and those with higher powers outside the gates. According to Gated Communities for the Rich and Poor, “The concentration of class and racial privilege in suburbs, fortressed enclaves, securitized buildings, and private islands takes place alongside the spatial concentration of poverty in ghettos, favelas, and barrios. Residential gates for the rich have also led to the rise of gates for the poor—in favelas in Brazil, South African townships, peripheral urban migrant settlements in China, and even in some public housing developments in the United States. The built environment sorts and segregates people, physically and symbolically distinguishing communities from one another. Whether one is locked inside or kept outside is determined by one’s race, class, and gender. In both kinds of gated communities, controlled access points restrict movement in and out. However, living in gated communities of the rich and poor are vastly different experiences. The privileged gates of Extensión Alhambra offer a retreat into a secure, idyllic community; newly privatized street and sidewalks are restricted to sanctioned, paying community members, who can decide who is allowed inside. In the impoverished community of Dr. Pila, in contrast, government and private overseers control the movement of residents. So while the gates of Extensión Alhambra permit their affluent residents to exert greater political and social influence over their home turf, in Dr. Pila they have the opposite effect, diminishing residents’ power. In privileged communities, gates lock undesirables out; in poor communities, they lock them in. In both cases, gates are erected to serve the interest of the upper classes, who are primarily white. In other words, gates reproduce inequality, and cement or—to use Michel DeCerteau’s term—“politically freeze” social distinctions of race and class.” This article talks about how the barriers of the gates that are put up as as a clear distinction between who holds the power in the society and who does not. The gates allow those with the power to choose who is inside and who is outside, allowing them to control the way that the power distribution occurs. Because of this clear distinction and barrier between two groups of different economic and social status, a gated community is a perfect example of a landscape of power/exclusion. 

Works Cited 

Dinzey-Flores, Zaire Zenit. “Gated Communities for the Rich and the Poor.” Contexts,

vol. 12, no. 4, Nov. 2013, pp. 24–29

https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504213511212.

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