Urban Decay

4 Pages 926 Words

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 Müslix 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 c...