Neil Blomkomp ’ s film Elysium (2013) is based on the parable of two Earths, one wallowing in the Anthropocenic decay of a burned-out planet and one orbiting above in bucolic (if run-of-the-mill) privilege. <sup>27</sup> Like the Cloud megastructures discussed in the City layer chapter, feudal megastructures such as these always come in pairs. Bloomfield Hills comes with South Detroit; Silicon Valley comes with its San Joaquin Valley. Today new enclave developments, and soon charter cities looping around them, are marketed as branded service platforms. In time, they will require more than this. In order to fully urbanize secession, they will have to take on the status of “ homeland ” and mobilize patriotism against the temptations of “ exit. ” Disney ’ s Celebration, Florida, is a landmark project here, from its branded mythology to its status as a self-governing city and county. Elsewhere developers recognize that a fetish for arbitrary distinctions of hierarchy isn ’ t a bug but a feature, and so at The Oaks, north of Los Angeles, residents who pass through one gate from the outside world still are excluded from the gated community inside the gated community, known as The Estates of The Oaks. In dense cities, enclaves are more vertical than horizontal and branded according to discreet (and discrete) address coordinates. In New York, One57 (Christian de Portzamparc, architect) and 432 Park Avenue (Rafael Vi ñ oly) towers near Central Park, and 56 Leonard in Tribeca (Herzog & de Meuron) are just a few options. The demos of the modern city presents certain difficulties not suffered by planners of the orbiting Elysium, however, as evidenced by concern in New York over so-called “ poor doors ” that would filter high-income from low-income residents of the same Westside tower, One Riverside Park. Readers of J. G. Ballard ’ s novel High Rise (1975) will also note the tendency for communities that live within the same building envelope, but strongly differentiated by status, to lurch inexorably toward tribal violence (and hence have a negative impact on unit resale value across the board). <sup>28</sup>
In light of this, it is not surprising to see enclave/camp conditions coexisting side by side and even sharing walls and borders, flipping interiority quickly or very slowly or not at all. My home university, University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, sits in the northwestern-most region of the San Diego/Tijuana metroplex, which is for many purposes a single city that happens to be bifurcated by an international border. A strategy of militarized luxury urbanism also has strong appeal to the affluent of Latin American cities in which violence is an everyday worry. For example, in San Salvador, “ wealthy Salvadorans can retreat to residential compounds that resemble a militarized version of a Palm Beach retirement community, complete with golf carts. Behind high walls and even higher voltage wires, one economist gushed to me: ‘ This place has everything — we never have to go outside! ’ For the rest, those who stay and those who get sent back, gangland drama is a fact of life. ” <sup>29</sup> But it is not as if the poor do not have their own megastructure gated communities, with their own special dispositions given for exceptional enforcement of rules. Consider the Dr. Manuel de la Pila housing block in Ponce, Puerto Rico, one of hundreds built after World War II:
The Stack to Come
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