Ebook: Domestic Fortress : Fear and the New Home Front

Today's home is a kind of fortress that tells us as much about our need for privacy as it does about ensuring our security. Fortress homes, gated communities and elaborate defensive systems have become everyday features of urban life, highlighting the depth of fear as well as the desire for prestige and social display and the ideological strength of home ownership. This book offers a fresh analysis of our homes, our demands for security and anxieties about invasion, loss and finding seclusion in a worrying and divided world. As security industries, media and politicians raise our fears further, the book considers why gating and fortress designs, beloved of celebrities and the super-rich, have become an ordinary feature of societies affected by rising social inequalities, the exclusion of strangers and the constant anticipation of disaster and loss in our daily lives. Using a rich range of sources from cutting-edge research to media accounts, the book considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants, and details the extreme measures now used in the pursuit of total safety.