Welcome Home

Researches in Gated Community Tourisms

in collaboration with Matt Thomas


PREFACE

Play.

Hit the shops. Walk to work. Green Longer. It’s not a vacation home. 

It just feels like one.

Why would you go anywhere else? It’s the nicest place you’ll ever see.

I know because I live here.

Make the secret yours.

Everything for everybody.

It’s like being told by your doctor that you need to eat more chocolate. The decision is easy. You’re going to make the secret yours. Notice the space between you and your neighbor.

There’s lots of it.

You’ve always wanted a horse, this could be the place to realize that dream.

Welcome Home!




PROJECT SUMMARY

We all need a break. A chance to get away from it all. To abandon our cares for a while. And then to return home feeling recharged and refreshed.


But what if we never had to come back? What if being at home was just like staying at a hotel? The neighborhood an island? The community a resort?  The neighbors tourists? And everyday life became a perpetual vacation?

Many gated communities promise this very sense of sustained escape. We are proposing to spend spring break within the branded environments of gated communities in order to experience their promises of an everyday vacation as a new mode of lifestyle tourism.


We have composed three itineraries to visit a variety of themed enclaves and attempt to enact their calls for harmony with nature, community connection, and escape from urban uncertainty. At the golf and equestrian-focused community, Golden Ocala, we will strive to “live like a resident” and “play like a member.” At the Terra Vista golf-centric community, we do our best to “perfect the game of life.” At the ecologically and socially-responsible Verandah, we will document how “everything is designed to remind you how good life can be.” At Bel-Lago, we will try to feel the“touch of Tuscany.” And at Arbor King,we will submit to the reign of “nature as king.”


We are framing this exercise as an experiment in the new tourism – a themed lifestyle vacation experience that will encourage tourists of the American landscape to take advantage of the resort aesthetics and amenities of gated communities.



RESEARCH QUESTIONS

While “on vacation” in gated communities across Florida, we will explore the following questions:

  1. •   How have the dream home and dream vacation converged into the typology of the planned community? Or, in other words, how has the American dream of home ownership fused with the dream of escape  (i.e. escaping city crowds, escaping risk, escaping socioeconomic and racial difference)?

  2. •   What can we learn about how gated communities are designed and curated that will help us understand how to better plan cities?

  3. •    If living in a gated community is designed to feel like a vacation, then where do residents go to escape the everyday getaway?

  4. •    And, what implications does a sustained escape have on our expectations and desires for our communities?