Outline_the_Inequalities_on_City_Road

Inequalities on City Road INTRODUCTION Today I will be highlighting some of the issues and inequalities surrounding City Road in Cardiff and comparing these inequalities to Broadway Road in Birmingham which is a street I am familiar with. As-well as focusing on how, inequalities and issues affect the people using the two roads. City Road consists of a multi-cultural society, but the way city road is structured does not reflect its society to its maximum as access to resources, are not available to everyone, particularly those who view city road as a rough or dangerous place to be at night. As some of the local people feel it to be unsafe to venture out after dark. However the safety issues highlighted by the locals are not shared by local police officer Bob Keohone, who refers to city road as being safe. At the municipal club [a gentlemen’s club] the men talk about a past where it used to be safe and somehow long for the past to be the future where one of the men’s daughter has to get a cab just to get home as he feels it to be unsafe for her to walk home. The same can be said for Broadway Road where locals when they used to leave money in milk bottles for the milkman and honesty was ripe. The unshared views between local police officer and the community can or may create a sense of insecurities amongst the local people. The insecurities felt on City Road compare to Broadway Road to some degree as local police officers took safety strongly, as police officers were based at the local school at 3.30pm to 4pm to encourage youth to go home and prevent gang fights, but the locals would have preferred a little more support outside of these hours as drugs and gang violence did not just start at 3.30 and finish at 4pm. Amongst safety issues local businesses are struggling to survive against bigger stores like Tesco’s moving who are an international giant, who overall can keep their cost down to attract customers where as small businesses would be at a loss to follow the same strategy of keeping costs down and cannot afford to provide a variety to attract a wide range customers. Local businesses are struggling to keep afloat in a community dealing with competition and consumers trying to save money. Such as the Mackintosh Centre which in the week is a sports centre and is not to everyone’s needs and is targeting those with an interest in sports. At the weekend it is a market which attracts a large variety of people, caters to everyone’s need, brings the community together, and creates a sense of excitement as one local looks forward to visiting the market on the weekend. Some of these businesses are family run businesses or have a traditional value, those lucky enough to target a specific audience are lucky enough to expand and survive as the store run by the Asian family, who built their business from a chip shop to a clothes store and on their success included a gold jewellery store within the clothes store which caters for Asian weddings or the African Lady running a African store selling a variety of African culture based products and only targets an African community or those with an interest in African artefacts. Running culture based stores; they are somehow keeping to traditional value and trying to understand and maintain their own culture and identity. The way the stores are run, you will find the same on Broadway road as you will have some stores which have been passed down the family and also those targeting specific communities. Competition between businesses can cause the smaller surviving stores to close as they cannot meet the demands of the locals as well as the other businesses. What does compare from City Road to Broadway road are the utilities provided such as water, gas, electric and lighting as well as the services and maintenance of these supplies and how they are supplied through underground works and sewers. Although City road is known as death Junction because it is quite a big road to cross and you have traffic coming from different direction whereas Broadway is just a two way road and there are no traffic lights. Today we have highlighted comparisons between to roads in two different cities which are structured and run in a similar way to each other. These two roads encounter the same issues such as competition, survival and recession.