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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2019
This chapter examines the ways in which areas such as luxury housing projects and enclaves are structured as luxurious, desirable and valuable by virtue of being unattainable by the general public. The nature of such “Veblen goods” is primarily to confer preeminent stature upon the owner; as such, they have to be strictly demarcated as being both desired by the majority of people, and also distinctly out of their reach. The chapter shows how dialectical tension between strong desire and distinct unattainability relies on a complex semiotics combining some of the elements of conviviality (safety, acceptance, comfort and well-being) with quite different elements of awe, superiority and rejection.
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