Paper short abstract:

The central question of this paper is: Change housing is a useful tool to upload on social mobility? This research attempts to classify the nature of neighborhood conflict, both interpersonal and structural.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution focuses on the significant increase in popular gated communities in the city of Lima, Peru. With the increase in income, allowing a housing change and housing re-location within the classes C and D ("lower-middle" class and "emerging middle class") from the periphery (shanty towns or from province) to residential gated communities on low- price-levels in the traditional districts of the city level. In this paper we are particularly interested on symbolic boundaries and barriers that are built when the housing change is involving new neighbors, apparently from the same social class occurs but inhomogeneous (mountain, coast, Amazon jungle) that apart its protagonists from the protection of emotional networks and functional relationship of the neighborhood of origin, resulting in a series of new concerns and fears. The central question of this paper is whether the strategy is a valid tool in the upward social mobility. In Lima many families have managed to make "the dream of homeownership," but in the same way the problems between neighbors have come to be an issue that concerns a great part of Lima society (70 %), worthy of being investigated as a social phenomenon to provide tools to improve the quality of life of those involved. In this research, which forms the third phase of work done during the years 2012 to the present, it attempts to classify the nature of neighborhood conflict, both interpersonal and structural. To gain access to a wealth of empirical material, pointing to a multi-sited ethnography in different formats of popular gated communities.