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lanes, and enjoy access to the public square.
    While this dual notion of property still exists, the right of public access and inclusion is becoming increasingly marginalized and diminished by the right of private ownership and exclusion, as the market economy comes to dominate more and more of the social domain. Consider the example of the changing pattern of home ownership in the U.S. Over the past forty years, growing numbers of Americans have taken up ownership in what are called common interest developments (CIDs). In these gated communities, not only are the homes privately owned, but even the streets, sidewalks, town squares, and parks are privately owned by the members who live there. Nonmembers often must seek permission at the gates to drive down the streets, walk on the sidewalks, stroll in the parks, or visit shops in the square. More than forty-seven million Americans—nearly one-sixth of the American population—already live in these private communities, and the numbers are growing dramatically. 14 CIDs may become the dominant living arrangement by mid-century.
    We Americans have, in just two centuries, come up against a basic contradiction that lies at the heart of the American Dream. We have long sought both autonomy and mobility and believe that the two are mutually reinforcing. Now millions of Americans have transformed large swaths of America’s public space into privatized communities, denying millions of other Americans access to and mobility through whole parts of America. A country that once prided itself on its openness and expansiveness—its lack of boundaries—is being systematically walled off into exclusive domains at an alarming rate, changing the very character of the American landscape and the American experience. There is nothing comparable to this vast privatization of living space in Europe.
    MacPherson notes that a private property regime was used for structuring human relationships in a world of physical scarcity. Now, notes MacPherson, at least for the top 20 percent of income earners, securing the right to a material revenue has been solved, and therefore their interest is turning to the more expansive and deeper issue of securing a quality of life. MacPherson argues, in turn, that property needs to be redefined to include the “right to an immaterial revenue, a revenue of enjoyment of the quality of life.” 15 He suggests that “such a revenue can only be reckoned as a right to participate in a satisfying set of social relations.” 16
    In a society of true abundance, the idea of excluding others becomes increasingly unimportant in structuring property relationships. If everyone has more than he or she needs, then what practical benefit is there in excluding others? In a society that has vanquished scarcity, immaterial values assume greater importance, especially the pursuit of self-fulfillment and personal transformation. The right not to be excluded from “a full life” becomes the most important property value people hold. Property in the new era, argues MacPherson, “needs to become a right to participate in a system of power relations which will enable the individual to live a fully human life.” 17
    Of course, for the four-fifths of the human race who still labor under conditions of abject poverty or bare subsistence, economist Hernando de Soto’s plea to catch up with the wealthy nations by establishing a private property regime, like the one Europe and America have enjoyed for the last two hundred years, makes some sense.
    There is, however, another reason why the developed societies find themselves between an old property regime based on the exchange of products in markets and a new property regime based on the right of access to one another’s assets in networks—that is, the increase in vulnerability that inevitably accompanies the change in the complexity and density of human interactions and the shrinking of space and time in a globalized world.
    I had the