Gated ‘downtown': Class collision and gentrification in the post-renovation city

City centers – like gated communities – have been a major concern of urban planners and academics during the last decades. In many aspects, these two urban phenomena resemble each other. For instance, the literature dealing with gated communities is prone to emphasize their potential to cause disruption of the urban road system as these cover extensive plots of land where access is restricted. In addition to making the city less permeable, this form of spatial segregation is commonly paralleled by some form of social exclusion, especially in third-world cities. By the same token, city centers contain a distinctive urban lay-out, filled with old, often run down urban structures, that act in the same way. Modernists cried out for urgent need to rescale city centers. Both areas have been the focus of much development in recent years. Although city centers have had more government investment while gated communities have come out of private investments, both have been market oriented. In the former case, redevelopment takes place for business, tourism as well as residential purposes. Much of these investments have been gentrifrying and have changed the way life takes place downtown. This paper aims at discussing the variety of ways public policies have targeted downtown, ‘gating’ them so that the poor is increasingly kept out of the area. Drawing on Neil Smith and David Harvey, the paper will refer to renovation projects, as the Bicocca-Pirelli, in Milan, the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, in Lisbon, the Nova Luz Urban Operation, in Sao Paulo, the Recife Antigo, and the Ribeira Urban Operation, in Natal.