Desire for safety, security, community, and ‘niceness’, as well as wanting to live near people like themselves because of a fear of ‘others’ and of crime, is expressed by most residents living in gated communities. The emergence of a fortress mentality and its phenomenal success is surprising in the United States where the majority of people live in open and unguarded neighborhoods. Thus, the rapid increase in the numbers of Americans moving to secured residential enclaves invites a more complex account of their motives and values. While their reasoning is largely the same as other middle class Americans, these seemingly self-evident explanations encompass deeper meanings and concerns. This article reviews the consequences of living in a gated community based on resident interviews, behavioral mapping, and participant observation field notes. I begin with a history of gating and then use ethnographic examples to summarize what I learned. I conclude with a discussion of ‘community’ as it is being re-conceived through a discourse of fear of crime in the United States through private governance and gating, and outline what we can do to ameliorate its negative aspects.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than forty White South Africans in a middle class neighborhood of Cape Town, this paper looks at the motivations to secure South African houses and neighbourhoods with perimeter walls, security initiatives and neighbourhood watches. The discourses of the residents make it clear that seemingly banal actions to secure the residential environment are motivated as much by the fear of falling property prices and the fear of losing psychological comfort as they are driven by the high levels of crime and fear of crime.

In the public spheres of the global cities, religion is getting more visible. However, this is not an independent process, but is linked to broader urban processes like segregation, security and (fear of) crime. With two different examples from Istanbul, this article explains how religious motivations become ways of expression for existing or emerging lines of urban segregation. While religious motivations appear as a tool used against urban gentrification in the area of Tophane; in the gated community of Basaksehir, religion, together with ‘fear of crime’ and ‘fear of immorality’, serves to differentiate a middle class living space from the ‘scary’ and ‘immoral’ environment of the big city.

This issue is concerned with what this introduction calls the production of secure space. It thematizes the relationship between subjective safety or insecurity and space. As a prism for the analysis of this relationship, the issue focuses on the phenomenon of (semi) gated communities. As most of the contributions show, subjectively experienced insecurity is often but one factor in the formation of gated communities and other ‘gated’ forms of living. In thus focusing on the motives of middle class residents for gated forms of living, this issue departs with the dominant strand in ‘administrative criminology’, which partakes in an increasing localization and depoliticization of issue of crime and safety.

In the Netherlands the discussion on the recent increase in residential domains with some sort of enclosure is fuelled by references to foreign examples (gated communities). However, large scale gated communities are absent in the Netherlands. Rather, we speak of enclosed residential domains. This article analyses the societal forces behind their popularity. Trends facilitating the further development of enclosed residential domains appear to be stronger than those impeding it. The growing need for shelter and a living environment that is predictable and familiar is especially important. Lack of safety, however, cannot directly be regarded as a prominent factor.