Compounding the Problem? : Gated Communities in Climate and Environmental Disaster Fiction

Abstract: The gated community motif occurs frequently within climate and environmental disaster fiction. This thesis investigates its occurrence across three media to establish how the gated community mode of living, as rendered in post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, responds to the threat and consequences of climate and environmental crisis. This thesis combines recent urban studies scholarship with ecocritical theory to analyse the gated communities present in Octavia E. Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, Neil Blomkamp’s film, Elysium, and Naughty Dog’s video games, The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Part II. Comparative analysis of the motif in each primary narrative reveals how disaster exacerbates the security and segregation this mode of settlement makes possible, resulting in a pronounced Othering of outsiders to these communities. This essay concludes that the boundaries of these speculative gated communities come to symbolise the borders Global North, which rhetorically and physically exclude the migrant Other. As most of the gated communities in these narratives experience catastrophe and collapse at the hands of those they refuse to accept, the texts appear to warn us to expect similar results unless issues of climate justice are not addressed by the Global North today.