Imagine a huge log cabin hugging a mountainside, with horses running past the picturesque red barn. Strategically placed ponderosa pines dot a perpetually green meadow. A stream meanders through. Now what if that picture included a private club, equestrian center, pool, golf course, and wireless internet? What if next door were 30 other faux 'western outposts' just like yours? And what if all of you were enclosed within one giant fence with a security gate? Whether this appeals to you or not, brace yourself, because this Disney-esque interpretation of rural living may soon be coming to a countryside near you.

Gated communities have long held a reputation as promised lands for well-heeled retirees: segregated, elitist, and pseudo-secure. But this new type of community, where residents possess multi-acred mini-ranches within the rigidly ruled and fenced-in fashion of association living, has put a new spin on the gated community, and on country living. As Florence Williams astutely observes in High Country News: 'The presence of a gate for humans in the middle of range country poses the obvious question: Why? Who lives 'inside' and who lives 'outside,' and why underline the demarcation in such an in-your-face way?'

Inside Hamilton, Montana's 'Stock Farm' development, for example, you will find club membership initiation fees of $125,000 and lots as expensive as $1.2 million (the cheapest ready-to-move-in building -- a two-bedroom cabin -- sells for about $800,000). Most residents are part-time, flying in on private jets for golf tournaments and long weekends. Outside, in the town of Hamilton, you will find a poverty rate of 16 percent and a general bitterness toward the Stock Farmers, stemming primarily from the newcomers' disinterest in getting to know their neighbors, as well as local resistance to change. 'The resentment I feel is part of a larger bag of resentments I haul around about the increasing privatization of the West,' one Hamilton resident told Williams. But it isn't just the West that is being fenced-in and privatized.

The idea of the gated rural community, reports Roberta Fennessy for Urban, was spawned in Florida by Peter S. Rummel, CEO of the state's largest real estate operating company. Rummel, not ironically, once worked for Disney as a creator of the notorious New Urbanist mecca, Celebration. Now, Rummel has taken planned development to a new level by selling expensive pre-fab farms in the swampy, isolated, mosquito-ridden panhandle of Florida. He's dubbed the concept -- touted as a reconnection with nature -- 'New Ruralism.'