Socio-spatial segregation and gated communities: The case of Antalya

The phenomenon of housing, as one of the basic needs of the human being, has come to borne different meanings together with the physical, social, cultural, economic, and political change and transformation taking place in the historical process. Rapid social and spatial alterations occurred in 1980s following the rising hegemony of the neoliberal global economic policies. In this period, economic and political factors like disintegration of the social welfare state, changes in the structure of employment, inequalities of income distribution, and proliferation of consumption culture played an important role in the formation of gated communities. Gated communities, emerging for the first time in the United States of America in 1970s and spreading throughout the world from 1980s onwards, have become an important indicator of the changes in the housing production and the meanings attributed to housing. Gated communities started to be commercialised by a discourse of ideal life style full of distinction in reply to the demands of the new middle and the upper classes who wanted "to differentiate themselves from the rest of the city". These classes prefer the gated communities in line with the socio-cultural factors like the desire to build a homogeneous community, the ideal for an elitist life, the aspiration for a secure life, the escape from the environmental and social problems of the city, and the need for socio-spatial segregation. Within the context of this dissertation, these socio-cultural factors affecting the preference of gated communities which are an outcome of the class-based socio-spatial segregation in Antalya case are dealt with. Keywords: City, Social Segregation, Spatial Segregation, Gated Communities.