Broken Hope
Presentation for ‘Can Do’ launch event – 4th March 2010
Dave Horton - Community First Officer Ely
"Improving the physical fabric of a community is proven to have a positive impact on the lives of local people"
A walk through our city of Cardiff would quickly reveal an obvious inequality in the lived environment. A person living in Rhiwbina or Penylan might expect to step out of their front door into a leafy city suburb with well maintained green spaces and clean streets. Meanwhile a person living in Ely or St Mellons is more likely to encounter a different environment on their doorstep – litter and fly-tipping hot-spots, graffiti and vandalism being everyday experiences. So people in the same city are living with different background scenery, scenery which acts as a visual indicator of ingrained inequality.
Research has clearly shown that the level of social inequality within a country directly corresponds to levels of mental and physical ill health. In countries with a big gap between rich and poor, mental and physical ill health will be more of a problem. In Britain the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent years and perhaps the physical environment is the most immediate and obvious indicator of this fact. Living in a community that feels neglected and unsafe leads to low self-esteem. It impacts on a person’s perception of themselves, their neighbour and their community. It can leave residents feeling unsafe and anxious. Opportunities for healthy outdoor activity tend to be limited. All this is experienced within a city that is relatively wealthy and in which neighbours not far down the road have access to a better environment and better opportunities. All these are contributing factors to high levels of poor mental and physical health. (RG Wilkinson)
Some years back a famous report by two American researchers introduced us to the ‘broken window syndrome’, the gist of which is captured in the following quote –
“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in run-down ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun).” – Wilson, J & Kelling, G