Urban planner Rahul Mehrotra, in a New York Times conversation with Neha Thirani, talking about gated communities, a dark side of the development in India that’s being fueled by global capital:

“At the micro level our biggest concern is going to be that of the immense polarization that is occurring in our built environment. The between what we call slums or the informal city and large-scale infrastructure and global architecture is going to set up enormous social tensions in our society. Global capital is landing in our cities and bullying its way physically to create a presence and a polarization which will be hard to reverse and resolve as we go on unless we address this issue very quickly.

What results from that polarization are conditions like gated communities, whether they are vertical gated communities or communities at the edge of the city. Because gated communities usually have their own water supply, sewage disposition, they are actually parasitic on the city because they don’t give to the city. They exclude the city but engage with the city on their own terms, and so it’s not a two way kind of exchange.”