p3 Flashcards
Unsuccessful places:
social deprivation includes:
- education
- health
- crime
- access to services
- living environment
CASE STUDY - DETROIT:
18% of adults have a college degree
10.7% of people in Detroit are white
7/10 crimes go unsolved
80,000 buildings are abandoned
It takes an average of 58 minutes for police to respond to calls
Education:
- Financial Constraints:
Impact: Families facing job losses often struggle with financial constraints, making it difficult to afford educational expenses.
Consequence: This can lead to reduced access to educational resources, including tutoring, extracurricular activities, and educational materials. - Educational Inequality:
Impact: Economic decline may exacerbate existing educational inequalities, with disadvantaged families experiencing a greater impact.
Consequence: Quality of education may suffer, contributing to a cycle of generational disadvantage. - Reduced Educational Opportunities:
Impact: Schools in economically distressed areas may face budget cuts, leading to a reduction in educational programs and extracurricular activities.
Consequence: Students may miss out on important opportunities for skill development and personal growth.
. Health:
- Strained Healthcare Systems:
Impact: Economic decline can strain healthcare systems, leading to a shortage of medical professionals, reduced funding, and limited access to healthcare facilities.
Consequence: Increased wait times, limited preventive care, and challenges in managing chronic conditions contribute to declining - health indicators.
Mental Health Challenges:
Impact: High stress levels due to economic uncertainties can contribute to mental health challenges within communities.
Consequence: Increased rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues further strain healthcare resources. - Limited Access to Healthy Lifestyle Choices:
Impact: Economic decline may limit access to healthy food options, recreational facilities, and wellness programs.
Consequence: This can contribute to an increase in lifestyle-related health issues, such as obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
Crime:
- Unemployment and Crime:
Impact: High unemployment rates create conditions conducive to criminal activities as individuals may resort to illegal means to meet their needs.
Consequence: Increased property crimes, theft, and other illicit activities can negatively impact community safety. - Social Stressors:
Impact: Economic decline introduces social stressors, contributing to heightened tensions within communities.
Consequence: Increased interpersonal conflicts and community tensions may manifest in elevated crime rates. - Reduced Policing Resources:
Impact: Economic decline may lead to budget cuts, reducing resources available for law enforcement.
Consequence: Limited policing resources can result in challenges in crime prevention and response.
Access to Services:
- Transportation Challenges:
Impact: Economic decline can lead to reduced public transportation services, impacting the ability of residents to commute for work, education, and healthcare.
Consequence: Limited transportation options can isolate communities and hinder access to essential services. - Utilities and Infrastructure:
Impact: Declining economic conditions may result in reduced investment in infrastructure maintenance, affecting utilities such as water and electricity.
Consequence: Infrastructure decay can compromise the overall quality of life and safety within affected communities. - Social Services Reduction:
Impact: Economic downturns may prompt governments to cut funding for social services, affecting programs related to welfare, childcare, and community support.
Consequence: Vulnerable populations may experience heightened challenges without adequate social support.
Living Environment:
- Housing Decay:
Impact: Economic decline may lead to a lack of investment in housing maintenance and renovation.
Consequence: Deteriorating housing conditions can result in health hazards, reduced property values, and diminished community pride. - Infrastructure Neglect:
Impact: Reduced resources may lead to neglect in maintaining essential infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and public spaces.
Consequence: Infrastructure decay can contribute to safety concerns, hinder economic activities, and reduce the overall appeal of the living environment. - Community Decline:
Impact: Economic decline can lead to a decline in community engagement and a sense of collective well-being.
Consequence: A diminished sense of community can further exacerbate social issues and impede efforts to address shared challenges.
Urban places
p1
- Success is either due to market forces, as places compete in our globalised world, and/or from government-led regeneration policies.
- London and the South East is a good example of this, benefiting from its function as the capital but also enhanced by successive government polices to protect its competitive status, such as the Thames Gateway, the 2012 Olympic Games and Heathrow expansion plans.
- The fact that a place is popular shows it is viewed as largely attractive to people.
- Meanwhile, large cities such as Birmingham and Bristol have developed strong service and financial sector economies, following the lead of London.
- People with lower incomes living in successful places will be especially disadvantaged from the higher cost of living and property prices, however.
- Another negative externality is that skills shortages may result from success, as seen across the UK in the sectors of IT, technology, creative, finance, engineering, plumbing, building and caring.
- This reflects a history of low take up educationally in these subjects, past government restrictions on skilled immigrants and, in London, inflated living costs.
Urban places
p2
- The Place Context on San Francisco and later content on rural commuter villages illustrates this paradoxical situation of success with negative spinoffs.
- The official ONS Well-Being Index and IMD deprivation index quantifies ‘success’ while independent surveys give more subjective perceptions.
- The annual Halifax Rural Quality of Life Survey and Sunday Times Index reveal some interesting regional scores:
- Southern areas have higher ratings for weekly earnings, the weather, health and life expectancy.
- Northern areas rate well on education in terms of grades and smaller class sizes, lower house prices in relation to earnings, and lower traffic flows and population densities.
Rural places p1
The 2011 census showed that rural places generally were experiencing a reversal of a 250-year trend of urban areas dominating jobs, wages and productivity:
* Some small villages and towns such as Worcester have been growing faster than many larger urban areas, both in terms of population and economic output.
Top of the Halifax survey list was Rutland in the East Midlands.
* Although affected by the global economic crisis, rural areas in general have lower rates of unemployment and insolvencies, with the exception of some ex-mining settlements. There has been much growth in smaller and micro businesses (under ten employees), and home working is more important than in urban areas. Higher-value food products are booming, as are leisure and tourism.
Rural places p2
- Accessible and ‘attractive’ rural communities have seen in-migration of young families, commuters and retirees.
- This counter-urbanisation reverses the long-term trend of net out-migration from the countryside to urban areas.
- Transport and technology innovations, especially mobile networks, and government investment in high-speed broadband has allowed more highly skilled professionals to live in attractive rural locations.
Social consequences of inequality
Reduced
Trust in people with positions of power, especially police and planners
Social and civic participation
Educational attainment and training
Social mobility
Attachment to place
Social consequences of inequality Increased
- Segregation of different socioeconomic groups, property damage and violent crime
- Health issues: either because of lack of wealth, access to care or more deliberate lifestyle choices
- Higher infant mortality and shorter longevity
- Status competition, which drives less-affluent people into debt to keep up with a peer group practising a higher level of consumerism
Urban decline
- In the UK, places like Hartlepool, a former shipbuilding and steel town in Teesside with an unemployment rate twice the national average (thirteen per cent), struggle with their Rust Belt legacy.
- Over a quarter of Hartlepool’s high street shops are empty, showing the lack of spending power in the area.
- There is a marked North-South and urban divide in success.
- The Centre for Cities research group sees the take up of knowledge economy employment as pivotal.
- Figure 16.2 illustrates the four main groups of cities in the UK, plotting lower-knowledge industries in 1911, most affected by deindustrialisation, against private knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) jobs in 2013.
- The size of the circles shows job growth changes:
- Reinventor cities
- Replicator cities
Reinventor cities
have changed their economic base successfully by encouraging IT and digital media, have higher wages, graduate workers, new businesses and productivity.
- Replicator cities
- replaced cotton mills with call centres and dock yards with distribution centres and are less sustainable.
- They tend to have a higher share of workers with low qualifications and a working age population claiming benefits.
- There is a distinct geographical pattern reflecting the difficulty in changing the legacy of a Rust Belt: 30 out of the 41 cities called ‘replicators’ in Figure 16.2 are in the North, Midlands or Wales, while eleven of the sixteen ‘reinventors’ are in the South.