Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Segregation and Fear in São Paulo

City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (2000) is the book in which the Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explains how fear of crime redesigned South America's largest metropolis. Her thesis is that São Paulo moved in two decades from a centre-periphery model of segregation to one of fortified enclaves: gated condominiums, towers with private security and guarded shopping malls where the middle and upper classes live, work and consume without setting foot on the street. Walls, she argues, are not just architecture: they are the material form of a citizenship that withdraws from the public realm.

The talk of crime and fear as narrative

Caldeira starts from a fact: between the 1980s and 1990s homicides in São Paulo multiplied, and the military police, heir to the dictatorship, responded with violence and abuses that citizens tolerated. In that context emerges what she calls the talk of crime, the everyday narrative of robberies, kidnappings and assaults that circulates at dinners, in taxis and in newspapers. That narrative sorts the world into good and bad, links danger to the poor, migrants from the Northeast and favela residents, and justifies any protective measure, including the privatisation of security and contempt for the rights of suspects.

Fortified enclaves: São Paulo's new segregation

The spatial answer was the fortified enclave. Caldeira analyses the real estate advertising of the period, which sold condominiums as islands of security, nature and social homogeneity, with high walls, guardhouses, cameras and internal services that made going out unnecessary. Unlike the classic suburb, these enclaves were often built right next to favelas, so that rich and poor live a few metres apart without sharing any space. The result is a segregation of proximity, harder to measure than segregation by distance but more corrosive, because it turns the neighbour into a threat and the wall into the only possible relationship.

Disjunctive democracy and walled citizenship

The book's third part is devoted to citizenship. Caldeira shows the paradox that the end of the dictatorship and the 1988 Constitution, which expanded political rights, coincided with popular rejection of the civil rights of the accused and open support for police violence and corporal punishment. She speaks of a disjunctive democracy: free elections and political participation coexist with the daily violation of human rights and with a public space that no longer gathers citizens. The walls of the condominiums and the bodies of suspects are the two faces of that disjunction.

The city of walls model across Latin America

The São Paulo case has been replicated across Latin America and beyond: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bogotá and Johannesburg have seen gated neighbourhoods grow with the same rhetoric of security and lifestyle. Caldeira also anticipated that the logic of the enclave does not stop at housing: schools, hospitals, offices and leisure are privatised and walled, and the open city is left to those who cannot pay for the wall. Later research confirms that gated communities do not reduce crime in the city; they only displace and concentrate it.

City of Walls remains the reference for understanding the relationship between fear, space and democracy. Its lesson is that the private security of a few is paid for with the public insecurity of all, and that a city that gives up the street as shared space also gives up the citizenship that is built there. The alternatives Caldeira points to involve police under civilian control, a justice system that works and quality public space in working-class neighbourhoods, because walls only come down when they stop seeming necessary.