Dd131_Tma01

Drawing on what you have learned about City Road, outline some of the inequalities on a street you know. In this assignment I aim to show how City Road shares the same inequalities as Portland Street. Portland Street is a heavily used road in the city centre it connects Lincoln High Street with Pelham Bridge both are major roads leading in and out of Lincoln City centre. Portland Street has access to residential and commercial property as well as Lincoln City’s football ground it is also home too many different kinds of shops and services from doctors and funeral services to specialized food shops. The 3 inequalities I will be looking at are parking, noise pollution and ethnic minorities. The first inequality that I am going to be looking at is parking. After watching the Making Social Lives DVD (‘Making Social Lives on City Road’, 2009) I noticed that parking is a major problem for both City Road and Portland Street, this causes inequality for people who own cars as there is a limited amount of parking available on the road and a pay and display car park located down a side street which is used mainly by people shopping in town. With a lack of parking available it is difficult for residents, traders and consumers to access the local area. This reduces the amount of people that can access the facilities available and reduces the income for the local area. Some local businesses such as Portland Tools and The John Cheatle Group have to relocate to other premises “to provide better car parking facilities for their customers.” (‘Lincolnshire Echo’ 2010) You can see by looking at City Road that most of the local parking facilities are road side parking bays in front of the shops, when you combine this with the amount of traffic passing through the area it becomes a very busy road with little or no parking available for deliveries or customers. The second inequality I am going to look at is noise pollution. Noise pollution is not something that would normally jump out at you, however an inequality that affects different groups of people. When you look at City Road it shows that you are constantly subjected to noise, the easiest comparison between City Road and Portland Street is during rush hour, they are both subjected to large numbers of vehicles ranging from the average car to the larger vehicles such as lorries. Despite the fact that Portland Street is not heavily used at night as there are no night clubs, take away’s or pub’s it still suffers noise from early morning to late evening from people going to and from work or simply traveling into town to do some shopping. City Road is different because there is a night life ranging from take away’s to pub’s, with resident’s living either above the shops or on a side street off City Road. These sorts of residential areas are not an ideal location for young family’s causing them to look further afield for more suitable housing. The third inequality that I will be looking at is ethnic minorities. When you watch the Making Social Lives you see Lloyd Robson talking to the owners of Xquisite Africa and Sanna Silk (‘Making Social Lives on City Road’ 2009). In these 2 parts of the DVD you can see that there are already 3 different ethnic groups working on City Road, there is African, Asian and English, all 3 bring something different to City Road, this attracts different ethnic groups to the area for many different reasons. The same is seen on Portland Street with shops such as Kublis and International Foods both of which are local convenience stores selling items from many different cultural backgrounds which help to support the growing amount of ethnic groups living in the local area. With shops selling goods from other cultures it allows people to try consumables from different cultures which would not normally be available. After comparing some of the inequalities from City Road to the same inequalities in Portland Street I have noticed that there is very little difference between the 2 streets, they both look very different but still share the same inequalities. I have realised that all streets share the same inequalities in some way. Some show more than others for example noise pollution can be anything from traffic on the street to noisy neighbour which is not always noticeable by passers-by, the main point I have learned from this is that we all live and interact with each other in the same way. Word count 746 References The Open University (2009) DD131 Introducing the social sciences – part 1 , ‘DVD 00611: making social lives’, Milton Keynes, The Open University Lincolnshire Echo, (2010) ‘A great place to park our businesses’, Lincolnshire Echo, 28 July [online] http://www.thisislincolnshire.co.uk/news/great-place-park-businesses/article-2460379-detail/article.html (accessed 23 May 2011).