Social Segregation to Exclusive Public Shoreline Access: Coastal Gated Communities on the Middle Shoreline of the Caspian Sea in Northern Iran

Abstract

Coastal areas are highly populated because people place considerable value on the coast for many reasons, namely aesthetic, naturalistic, and utilitarian. The physical manifestation of modernity in communities stimulates the privatization of these areas, contributing to social isolation. The term gated community is a term privileged among planners, politicians, developers, and society. It refers to the residential area where entrance is constrained by walls, fences, and gates, which causes the exclusion of public access to services such as the natural landscape of coasts, parks, and sport facilities within. Darya-Kenar and Khezer-Shahr coastal gated communities in the north of Iran were built in the 1960s by the government and are now luxury places for residential and recreational activities. This research aims to define the causes of and consequences for social well-being from gating in a coastal tourist area and explains the challenges of an exclusive public shoreline. The enclosed nature of the gated communities, which restricts public access to the shoreline inside the gates, raises the issue of social segregation in the region. The participatory and collective rationality for decision making in gated communities has increased social cohesion and caused explicit local determination for maintenance of the privatized public shoreline. But for the public sector, with its centralized manner and monopoly power, public goals are difficult to meet due to their inefficient organizational structures and the lack of public knowledge and information considering environmental values. As a result of uncontrolled increased development, limited funding, insufficient percipience of inhabitants about the concept of public access to the shoreline, and the prioritization of organizational interests over public ones, public policy cannot effectively encourage its implementation without sufficient political will, adequate regulatory enforcement, and organizational capacities.

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