Home Control and Urban Inequality in Past-urban Puerto Rico.

Central to "building Puerto Rico" after WWII was providing citizens with adequate and "honorable" homes, which resulted in two types of housing that spatially brand social life in the island: multiple-dwelling public housing and suburban single-family subdivisions. The articulated relationship between the house and personal and spiritual security, articulated via these two housing forms, resulted in the introduction of the residential gate for private as well as public housing. This intervention was explicitly developed to address the island's growing crime rate at the end of the 20th Century. Here, I argue that the community gates (in public as well as private housing) are mechanisms for defining, controlling, and preserving the idea of "home" and community. I explore the role that gates play in supporting housing ideals, defining the sanctioned users and controllers of the city, and recognizing and organizing anonymous moving bodies across space. Furthermore, home gates corral unequal urban landscapes; protecting rich lifestyles, sequestering the poor, and regulating women. In this segmentation of lifestyles, I argue that Puerto Rican society is a past-urban Caribbean society; beyond the promise of the city. And the home becomes the locus of this new organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]