Social lives lived out in and around streets offer to social sciences an insight into modern society. By comparing benefits and losses for different individuals on City Road in Cardiff and Holloway Road in London, this text will show how streets provide a space to transform ways people view their identities. It will be shown that people create communal lives, as well as re-imagine national identities. On the other hand, streets also exemplify separation and inequality, such as an undermining of national belonging, or a division on bases of economic success. Thus, what is seen on city streets is transferable to other places and people, showing patterns of human behaviour that are universal on all streets in the world.
Firstly, making and repairing of society is significant for identities that are maintained and formed on a street. People take part in services, activities and communication, which make them interact and relate to one another in different ways. Different places and premises have a dual function, and offer a space for interaction and a formation of communal life. On City Road, Taste Buds Cafe is not only a place to sell food, but to also 'foster a sense of community' (Blakeley et al., 2009, p.24), and belonging. Similarly, Holloway Road's cafes such as cafe and tearoom Temptations creates a space for an exchange of ideas and experiences. City Road also supports a certain way of life through Saturday farmer's market in the Mackintosh Centre, where local people come together due to a shared interest in foods. Holloway Road offers community support in the same fashion within Lorraine Community Centre facilities, which provide opportunities for socialising from community gardening to sporting events.
Moreover, the street ...
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...owners losses in profit. Holloway Road manifests the same trend with increasingly more supermarkets. However, on this street, change is a frequent matter. Therefore, there is not the same nostalgia some people, such as members of the Municipal club on City Road, experience, and transformation of Holloway Road is accepted more easily.
In conclusion, there are positive and negative developments one can observe on city streets. Repairing society means different things and different results for various people, keeping some included and some not, adding to a complex web of social interactions.
Works Cited
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Introducing the Social Sciences. Making Social Lives. (2009). [DVD] Open University Press.
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Peckham has been dubbed as London’s buzzing up and coming new hotspot, with “galleries, rooftop bars and foodie night markets that make East London look positively parochial” according to an article by Chris Martin in 2013, a stark contrast to Olsen (1997) labelling it “an inner city area which is among the poorest and most deprived in the country... Blighted by ills such as drugs, crime, unemployment, low educational achievement, a deteriorating infrastructure; life lived at the margins.” In this literature review I am going to review the main issues surrounding how the area has changed, discuss the new demographics coming into the area, issues such as gentrification in the area and also the increasing cultural segregation that is becoming evident in the area, both spatially and temporally.
However opposing theorists (Ponterotto, 2005) have highlighted that even though the broad groupings in the social sciences are not derived from paradigms present in the natural sciences, the individual sub-disciplines may still be underpinned by a paradigm or a research programme with similar rese...
There are many examples of cities reforming itself over time, one significant example is Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. More than a hundred years after the discovery of gold that drew thousands of migrants to Vancouver, the city has changed a lot, and so does one of its oldest community: Downtown Eastside. Began as a small town for workers that migrants frequently, after these workers moved away with all the money they have made, Downtown Eastside faced many hardships and changes. As a city, Vancouver gave much support to improve the area’s living quality and economics, known as a process called gentrification. But is this process really benefiting everyone living in Downtown Eastside? The answer is no. Gentrification towards DTES(Downtown Eastside) did not benefit the all the inhabitants of the area. Reasons are the new rent price of the area is much higher than before the gentrification, new businesses are not community-minded, and the old culture and lifestyle of the DTES is getting erased by the new residents.
“One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences .... Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”
Babbie, E. (2007) The Practice of Social Research. Thomson Higher Education. Belmont. (USA) Eleven Edition.
Of the many problems affecting urban communities, both locally and abroad, there is one issue in particular, that has been victimizing the impoverished within urban communities for nearly a century; that would be the problem of gentrification. Gentrification is a word used to describe the process by which urban communities are coerced into adopting improvements respective to housing, businesses, and general presentation. Usually hidden behind less abrasive, or less stigmatized terms such as; “urban renewal” or “community revitalization” what the process of gentrification attempts to do, is remove all undesirable elements from a particular community or neighborhood, in favor of commercial and residential enhancements designed to improve both the function and aesthetic appeal of that particular community. The purpose of this paper is to make the reader aware about the significance of process of gentrification and its underlying impact over the community and the community participation.
This essay focuses upon evidence gathered from people who provide good examples of ‘making and remaking’ on City Road in relation to connections and disconnections. Evaluations are drawn from the relevant Open University reading and visual resources and the essay is revised following ‘TMA 01 feedback’ (TMA FORM PT3e: TMA No 01, 2016).
Silva, E. B. (2009). Chapter 7. Making Social Order. In: Taylor, S., Hinchliffe, S.,Clarke, J. and Bromley, S. (eds.) (2009). Introducing the Social Sciences. Making Social Lives. Milton Keynes: The Open University.
"Step Up 2 the Streets." Age [Melbourne, Australia] 20 Mar. 2008: 7. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.
The town of Manchester is built wherein; the rich and poor are separated. The rich people or sometimes called “bourgeoisie” are allowed to live their life without coming into contact with the workers. There are unspoken rules that the working-people’s quarters are separated from the middle-class or the rich people. The commercial district is at the center of Manchester which includes offices and warehouses. The poor people live behind the commercial center and their houses lie in a bad environment for their health, which is proved by having dirty Irk water for them to use. There houses are covered with dirt, broken windows can be seen and there is a foul smell also. In contrast, the rich people live “in remotes villas with gardens, in free, wholesome country air, in fine and comfortable homes”.
In sidewalk lives, the men working the streets, through abundant and multi-levels interactions with society, have to share certain unique terms (and their interpretations) in order to communicate, define and thus maintain their existences.
The sidewalk is a social structure for the people who work and live in it. They are mentors for each other. They play the same role of self-direction and psychological fulfillment of a formal job or family for example; where the society is shrunken on that one sidewalk. They form an informal social organization and social control so they can survive against the outer social system; meanwhile, this social organization organizes property rights and division of labor. Although their life seems deviant, they still practice conventional social practices and norms. Although it might seem that these men are engaged in random behavior, yet there is an organized interaction of norms and goals, and a shared collective self-consciousness from having a shared common history.
Weber, Max. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Eds. Edward A. Shils & Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
The theme of community has always had a central and prominent place in social theory. A number of connected problems are at the heart of social theory. These related problems are often thought of as variations of the key problems of the relationship between ‘the community’ and ‘the individual’. (Browning et al., 2000) Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. While the “community “may be a family unit, it is usually understood in the wider sense of interactions between the community of people in a geographical location, or who have a shared history or interest. (Wiki, 2014) Thus, this philosophy, in this period, has been said to be prominent in a number of distinctive and time-specific ways. Community is just the whole range of that sort of group or institution-not the individual, not the family, not the state, not the market, but all the ones in between: churches, neighbourhoods, schools, clubs, kinship networks, associations etc. The concept of community refers to both a particular class of social entities, and to a particular range of social relations. (Browning et al., 2000) Some characteristics of this philosophy includes the fact that it is related to older theories of community such as Marxism, pragmatism, romanticism, ethical socialism, and strands of theology from the Jewish, Christian and other religious traditions. Secondly, a number of government-sponsored social policies have brought the term ‘community’ to a new prominence in political and social discourses- policies such as community care, community policing and community regeneration. These programmes during the 1980s were introduced by right-wing governments who attempted to yoke them together with ...