"...conversation for the past couple days..." You mean past couple of days back in 2003?
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I grew in a variation on this gated community idea which worked very well. It was in a part of London where tye developer back in Victorian times had designed the place so that the streets of high terraced houses had a large common garden at the back, shared with the houses on the next street over. So the front was an ordinary street, open to the world, and at the back a large shared garden which was locked.

It wasn't done that way to stop burgaries and all that so much, but rather so that children from the various houses could play out together in safety from traffic and so on. Over time the houses had become divided up into flats, and it was avery mixed community.

It always struck me as an excellent model of urban development, and I'm surprised it isn't a lot more common.