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Introduction
There are three types of residential developments in Malaysia, namely, open neighborhoods, guarded neighborhoods, and gated communities. Open neighborhoods are residential areas with no street barricade erected in older and traditional neighborhoods. A guarded neighborhood is a formerly open neighborhood where residents establish barriers such as manual boom gates and security signs and employ security guards to control access by closing smaller public streets that lead into their residential areas. Because of the desire for exclusive living among house buyers, Malaysian housing developers begin to build gated communities surrounded by walls enclosing attractive shared amenities.
A gated community can be defined as a residential area which has fenced up perimeters or are surrounded with a masonry wall that restricts public access (Blakely and Snyder, 1998). With reference to The Federal Town and Country Planning Development (2010), a gated housing community has a 24-hour security system conducted by either security patrols, CCTV or both. Gated communities are generally equipped with facilities and amenities such as swimming pools, landscaped parks, clubhouse and playgrounds. Gated communities can be in the form of high-rise buildings such as apartments or condominiums or landed properties such as terraced houses, semi-detached and bungalow houses.
Gated community enclosures are common in urban areas of the USA (Blakely and Snyder, 1998), Canada (Grant, 2005), and England (Blandy, 2006), China (Huang, 2006), South Africa (Jurgens and Gnad, 2002; Breetzke et al. , 2014) and Latin America (Janoschka and Borsdorf, 2006; Clement and Grant, 2012). Although the concept of a gated community is still considered relatively new in Malaysia, gated communities are proliferating rapidly (Kumar, 2013; Ammani, 2013; The Federal Town and Country Planning Department, 2010). It is clearly apparent with more and more gated properties mushrooming particularly in the urban areas such as Kuala Lumpur and Penang. The gated community housing scheme is without a doubt gaining more popularity among Malaysians. According to Tan (2011a), there is an increasing awareness on the value of a gated property. Furthermore, a gated housing area is one of the top five criteria in purchasing a house among Malaysian home buyers (Aruna, 2013).
One may ponder upon why an emphasis is placed on enclosure communities these days. This is possibly due to the fear of crime among...