Looking at the city through walls: from gated communities to Rio’s city-condominiums

Abstract

The urban form of condominiums has been the main model of urban development in large cities lately, and it is also the housing model that has received the most public attention since the 1990s. As a global model, but strongly marked by local agents and forces, condominiums have developed in ways that still lack analytical attention that sheds light on the local specificities of each case. In this article, I trace the path that the concept has taken, from its origins in American gated communities to Brazilian “gated condominiums”, in an attempt to propose a research agenda that considers this object both as a global phenomenon and as a heterogeneous field. Using the city of Rio de Janeiro and the condominiums of Barra da Tijuca as an empirical case, I focus on the analytical possibilities that we gain by taking condominiums seriously as an object of research. I argue that by making this dual effort of comparison and individualization, we are able to focus on different characteristics and heterogeneous specificities of “condominium life” generated within these spaces. From this, I propose three dimensions of studies in this field: urban development; thinking of them as “closure experiences”; and a focus on intermediary associations and institutions.