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Volume: 19 Issue: 3 Year: 2024
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The Villa as Bios: Gated Communities as a Crystallized Anti-Urban Society [Megaron]
Megaron. 2012; 7(1): 63-78

The Villa as Bios: Gated Communities as a Crystallized Anti-Urban Society

Mai Hawas, Mohamed Hawas
Department Of Architecture, Engineering Faculty, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt

As a post -Metropolitan lifestyle, Gated community sprawl presenting protected, secured communities, reflecting the need for reorganizing a spatial space manifesting a dream for the elite. Whether it is a dream of secured living against the unstable community forced by political regime, or a dream of wealth influenced by the gulf imported undefined lifestyle. The term Villa refers to both social manifestation and the need for redefining local identity. Isolating the community through walls and using different tools for secured settlements, representing the villa as a product of capitalized community rather than a social entity. It becomes a manifestation of economic system that breaks the urban homogeneity establishing new values. Exploring the need for more liberal community, gated communities are established by the elite, to be able to live within more democratic community. The villa -in that sense- is not an architectural expression of the social values of the elite rather than an expression for the need to isolate from the dictatorial community that suffers from poverty & instability. A bios is being materialized against a normal growth for the city with all its urban fabric, and it is considered -in another level- a manifestation for the bios of capitalism against the identity of local communities, as against its economic systems. The proposed paper is arousing the following question and in search for the answer: Did gated communities achieve the secured urban fabric for the elite? Whether Through architecture expression or urban fabric, its pattern language seems to reflect unsecured morphology rather than secured.

Keywords: The Villa, Bios; Anti-Urban

Corresponding Author: Mai Hawas, Egypt
Manuscript Language: English
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