Total Gating': Sociality and the Fortification of Networked Spaces

摘要

Starting with a description of Wynyard Park in Teesside, a development that combines gated residence, workplace and leisure space, 'fear of the other' is identified as a key but underexplored motivating force behind this kind of 'total gating', an argument based on existing empirical studies of gated communities. It is argued that a radical reading of Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of the other can do the explanatory work that would flesh out this allusion to fear: first, by reading the unknowable Levinasian other as repulsive in his/her threat to the individual's ontological security; and second, by making ontological insecurity fundamental to Levinas' account of ethical sociality. To conclude, this work is then situated in a mobility/moorings discourse.