On the technocratic dystopia of “Master Planned Communities”
The website for the gated community reads:
“The feeling of coming home is the ultimate comfort. It’s looking around and knowing your surroundings are a distinct reflection of who you are. At Estrella, these mountains are your front door, welcoming you in to a life filled with ease while ushering in a new day of endless potential.”
And yet whenever I’m here I can’t help but shake the sense of dystopian dread that permeates these kinds of gated communities. I likened it to the human equivalent of a hamster enclosure when talking to my wife the other day. These places are part of a development trend called “Master Planned Communities.” They aim, much like a well designed hamster habitat, to provide everything an individual might need in a self contained community existence. Mixed use development, proximity to easy consumption, amenities, safety, community, etc etc..
Some of the premises of planned communities are even popular among progressive segments, for example in the urban planning niche, which seems to suffer from a uniquely gross technocratic thirst to bring “efficiency” to every aspect of human existence in the endless drive to shove all of life in to a technological procrustean bed. But as is often the case the reality and the plan seem to become disjointed, the utopia was always a false promise. It’s the kind of thing that you might read about in something like Huxley’s Brave New World, in that uniquely Huxleyan capacity to illustrate how utopian intentions so easily devolve into dystopian traps as the realities that manifest in the name of the grand schemas ultimately falls short of the mark. The promise of the little community gives way to a cloistered and routine existence in which everything has been planned and provided for us, the negation of life in any meaningful sense.
In the words of the inimitable American poet Robinson Jeffers:
“In pleasant peace and security
How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die
He shall look up above the stalled oxen
Envying the cruel falcon,
And dig under the straw for a stone
To bruise himself on.”
That eternal enemy of modern life creeps in once again, “boredom.” And this is only to speak of the subjective experience, not to speak of the manifold forms of systemic violence that maintain places like this, the little violences that hold the gates and hold up the rigid formalism of the whole institution. The ecological violence to the land, the social violence inherent in the politico-economic systems that make these structures possible, etc etc..
The most beautiful things in these places are the peripheries, the little spaces that escape the authoritarian overcoding of the space. The spillways that catch the torrent that rolls through the desert in monsoon season. The scrub brush that is left to grow where people can’t be bothered to keep up with it or the slight disorder allowed to exist in wayward sections of a gravel bed.
Lest I sound a little too ho-hum about all of this, it is great to spend time with family. But it’s always a little weird to be in these places and I can’t help but find the whole institution just a little dystopian and disturbing. A friend of mine once said in a conversation we were having, “Welcome to the future. It kinda sucks though.” And I think that encapsulates my experience quite well. If this is a future that some people want, I’m not sure I’m on board with that future. I’ll gladly leave the hamster cages to everyone else and I’ll stick with the unruly frontier up in Montana. The grizzly bears are welcome company and it’s too damn hot down here anyway.
