Inner City example essay topic

Urban Decay: barricading our cities, And our minds Everyone bemoans the way street crime, visible poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, decaying homes and boarded-up businesses are becoming increasingly common features of city life, but we rarely ask ourselves how this deterioration in the world around us is affecting the way we look at the world. In not asking that question, we underestimate the importance of urban decay as a problem in its own right, and the degree to which it promotes other social ills. Inner city decay is part of a dangerous and silent progression that is not being given the attention it deserves: the fragmentation of our society into potentially or actually hostile camps, barricaded off from each other. And it has the potential, in the end, to exercise an important influence on the course of national politics. In order to see why, we have to start by looking at how decay happens.

It begins with an anti-urban bias, a belief, deeply-rooted in Canada and the United States, that cities are, at best, a necessary evil, and the likely scene of violence, social disorder, dirt and tension. Rural and small-town life, by contrast, is associated with cleanliness, sturdy reliability and family values. The conclusion: We may need cities for our livelihoods, but they are not good places to live. These conceptions have been promoted by a profusion of media images. Consider The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, or that odious M"us lix commercial that romanticizes fruit-picking.

More to the point, for the past half-century the notion that we can live better outside the inner city has been energetically and effectively advocated by a development industry that gained its foothold on wealth and power -- and continues to augment that wealth -- through suburban development. New subdivisions are sold by purveying the image of a home in quasi-rural surroundings, but conveniently located near the city. The fact that these semi-rural paradises rapidly become urban areas distinguished from the city proper mainly by their monotony only serves as a basis for promoting a subsequent round of flight to the new urban fringe. In short, we are a society in a perpetual state of flight from the city.

In practice, most people who can afford to move out of the inner city do so. To be sure, there are middle-class and wealthy people residing in selected downtown areas -- gentrified older neighbourhoods or up-scale condominiums, especially in the most prosperous cities. But the vast majority of people with money to spend prefer to live outside the inner city. In the neighbourhoods that are not gentrified, that leaves those who cannot afford to move out. Poverty is not necessarily accompanied by social problems, any more than wealth guarantees the absence of social problems.

But when a metropolitan area is divided into neighbourhoods where poverty predominates and others where comfortable circumstances are the rule, it is inevitable that there will be a concentration of social problems in the poor areas. At the same time, the exodus from those areas makes it inevitable that, as the problems escalate, the resources for dealing with them will dwindle. Where social problems predominate, lawlessness follows. Increasing crime and growing poverty lead to the decay of some downtown neighbourhoods.

Houses are boarded up. Some neighbourhoods become so crime-ridden and decayed that they turn into no-go zones, and, hey presto, the bias against cities that started it all begins to look factual. Confronted with growing evidence of the nastiness of city life, growing numbers of people take counter-measures. First they lock their car doors when they drive through what, in their minds at least, has become The Ghetto. But of course their neighbourhoods are not free of crime either, and when they are hit by crime they imagine that it has been committed by a refugee from the hideous streets of the inner city. The solution, or so may of them begin to believe, is to fortify their homes against outsiders.

It begins with high fences, heavy gates and barred windows, then proceeds to the hiring of private police to patrol the neighbourhood. When that still does not produce the yearned-for feeling of security, the next step is gated communities: whole subdivisions, entire condominium developments, or apartment complexes protected from the outside world by armed guards or electronic security. Such developments have already proliferated in the United States and are gaining a foothold in Canada. A similar mentality is evident in retail trade. Shopping malls have always been highly controlled environments, carefully designed for the sole purpose of circulating potential customers as quickly as possible from one purchase to the next. From the outset, penniless lingerers were kept at bay.

Security personnel forbade lengthy stays in the food court. Benches in the mall corridor looked attractive, but had been designed, possibly by sadists, and apparently with the objective of encouraging short rest periods. In time, such measures have been augmented by electronic security and guards who double as bouncers instructed to deal summarily with anyone deemed an undesirable presence. What is happening here is not only growing fear of the poor, but also the privatization of public space, which is given an added push by government cut-backs. Public streets are moved indoors into malls and become private preserves. Parks and streets in gated communities are barred to anyone who does not live there.

User fees are charged for the use of other parks and public facilities so that, in practice, they become the property of those who can afford the fees.