Property Rights and the Public Realm: Gates, Green Belts, and Gemeinschaft

Discussions about gated communities, shopping malls, and industrial parks—proprietary developments produced by entrepreneurs—frequently espouse overly simplistic notions of private and public realms, viewing the encroachment of the latter by the former as a threat. In this essay I develop the thesis that, in reality, cities naturally fragment into many small publics , each of which may be thought of as a collective consumption club. The club realm may, therefore, be a more useful—and theoretically more powerful—idea than the public realm. I argue that proprietary communities are a particular case of urban consumption club—one in which legal property rights over neighbourhood public goods are assigned by property-market institutions. In other respects, the club realms that they create are not dissimilar from club realms created by other urban governance institutions. Government, the markets, and voluntary community action can all effectively assign property rights over shared neighbourhood goods, and in so doing create a set of included ‘members’ and a set of excluded ‘nonmembers’. In contextualising the discussions of gated communities in this way, I draw connections between three interrelated concepts: public goods, the public domain, and the public realm.