INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
Territory, control and enclosure: the ecology of urban fragmentation
Feb 28 - Mar 3, 2005
Pretoria, South Africa

About the Conference

Background

Like it or not, cities are being reshaped by market-driven, and in some cases, government-driven territorial enclosure. In the USA, possibly as many as 80% of new homes are governed by home owners associations. In some US cities, new developments are required to have HOA neighbourhood governance. In the world's fastest growing economy - China - all new developments have walls, guards and private governments. In Johannesburg, there are a great number of (something like 300 applications in one year for road-closures) applications per year for road-closures - an attempt to re-engineer patterns of public-private ownership and control. The privatisation of traditionally public urban resources and services are not confined to residential areas: Walmart recently collected 10,000 signatures in a Los Angeles suburb to put its proposal for a 60 acre megastore development to the vote. It lost the vote but success would have created a city within a city - a commercial neigbourhood governed by its own private rules. Citizens in Contra Costa county, San Franciso Bay voted the other way, overturning, by a large majority, a council-passed ordinance prohibiting megastores. Private shopping streets (malls) have reshaped the retail ecology of cities by stealth and are now unremarkable - apart from at the margins of the currently acceptable size (a margin that has grown steadily and will continue to do so).

Entrepreneurs are finding profitable ways of delivering civic goods and services; the boundaries between government and market are being explored and discovered by experimentation; the ecology of the 20th century city is under stress; and new institutional, organisational and spatial forms of order are co-evolving.

Two questions capture the imagination in popular and academic discussion about these issues: Where is it all going? Is it something governments should allow, outlaw, regulate, or promote? This is the next in an innovative series of symposia exploring key issues relating to the global phenomena of gated communities; private urban governance; common interest developments; and public space enclosure. Meeting first in Hamburg in 1999, then in New York, Mainz, Glasgow and New Orleans a cross-disciplinary network of academics have been examining what may turn out to be one of the defining features of urbanisation in early stages of the 21st century: the re-shaping of traditional urban territories and ecologies.