Inequalities on City Road

Overview

In my assignment TMA01 I will introduce some inequalities on City Road in Cardiff.
First of all I want to start by explaining what inequalities actually means. Later on I will pick two examples from the Learning Companion 1 and the Making Social Lives DVD to give a deeper understanding of inequalities in our society. After that I will summarize the examples and give you my opinion to what I have learned so far in this course.

“Inequality refers to the unequal distribution of valued social resources within a society or between societies.“ (Blakeley et al., 2012, page 24) These resources can either be money, time, education or different cultural backgrounds.
You may think, that inequality is the same as differences, but in the social sciences these two terms are not the same. The term differences is used for groups of people for example regarding to the age, the gender, the sexuality or the ethnicity. “Difference is not the same as inequality although some differences are often associated with inequalities. Difference in age may be linked to inequalities in mobility and access to places. Racial and gender differences may be linked to inequalities in salaries and access to education.“ (Blakeley et al., 2012, page 24)
As you can see, the two terms are related to each other, but they are not the same.


Examples

The first example that I want to show is Colin Buttwell, a newsagent on City Road who is introduced in the Making Social Lives DVD in scene 3. He talks to Lloyd Robson about his shop. Colin Buttwell owns this shop since 1965 and before his father was the owner of the shop. His business has changed since the big stores like Tesco or Spar opened a few blocks from him. People tend to go to the big supermarkets to buy everything they need and Mr. Buttwells business suffers from that. He still sales the same things that he did over 40 years ago, but the customers are getting less and less.
The opening of big supermarkets like Tesco or Spar...