Inequalities

In this essay i will outline some of the inequalities on hand of the example of Via Dei Portici in Bolzano (Italy), as well as compare them to City Road. The street itself is one of the oldest in town and situated right in the heart of the city. On its nearly a mile long stretch you can find a huge variety of retailers, cafes, banks and even a little fruit market. In some of the cafes you will find old black and white pictures of the street which then was not more than a dirt track exactly like City Road used to be.
The inequalities I will be focusing on are the struggle of little shops to compete with the prices of the big chain shops, the accessibility of the street and the change of its usage between different times a day.
While the first thing when walking down City Road which I observed were the various and numerous restaurants and Take Aways, walking down Via dei Portici you will notice cloth shops instead, all lined up next to each other in the ground floors of the old houses. The houses have been looking the same way since ages due to the safeguard of the cultural and environmental heritage. However the shops types and owners change so often that as soon as you learn and remember a shops name its gone and replaced by a new one. There are only a few shops which have actually been there since how long i can remember. They were passed on from generation to generation and stayed in family possession but over the years even them started slowly to disappear and make place to one of the big chain stores, which because of their size can offer goods much cheaper. While the older generation tries to fight these changes by shopping in the old established businesses the younger generation welcomes the new high street shops and its modern goods. We have seen something similar with Colin and his Newsagent shop which was in possession of his family since generations. Colin also describes the changes after some fo the big supermarket opened up nearby. (“Making social...