The Lived Experience of Residents in an Emerging Master-Planned Community

Master-planned communities around the world are developed and purposefully planned to address housing sustainability and community connectivity; they often have a distinctive look, and appeal to a particular customer base desiring a strong, utopian-esque community. However, the lived experience of new residents joining master-planned communities has not been explored. This paper examines the lived experience of new residents within an emerging Australian master-planned estate, and reports on the first two stages of a longitudinal study focusing on the results of an online forum. This unique study presents real-life findings on a culturally diverse community. The findings reveal how the purposeful development of community identity in the early stages of the MPCommunity has not led to satisfactory levels of social infrastructure or social connectedness for the pioneering residents. The physical and social environment, as interpreted by residents against the developers’ imagined vision and marketing testimonies, has not been entirely satisfactory. Infrastructure issues—such as transport, and access to daily activities such as shopping, work, and school—were points of frustration and dissatisfaction. The findings provide insight into the challenges and opportunities for residents in a developing MPC, and further our understanding of the specific factors that inform us as to how social infrastructure can best encourage and support connection within existing and future MPC developments.

Foot Voting in the Private Sector

This chapter explains how foot voting in the private sector can expand political freedom. Some 69 million Americans currently live in private planned communities, and such arrangements can offer better and more diverse foot-voting opportunities than public jurisdictions alone. This type of foot voting is not as clearly “political” as others, but it still enhances political freedom in the sense that it provides an alternative to the government. Much can be done to increase the availability of private planned communities, including for the poor. The chapter also addresses claims that private sector foot voting does not qualify as genuine political choice, that it can only benefit the affluent, and that it has severe limitations of scale.