Increasing Violence with Increasing Urbanisation, according to Location?



'Guns and gangs' GONZALES, Belmont and Urban Sprawl



Background
In north-east Port of Spain, Belmont is a district within a continuous urban area. Belmont was the city's initial suburb and began conurbation with the Central Business District. It is sited at the base of the Laventille Hills and has been continuously augmenting its population which are of usually middle/ lower-middle class.
Gonzales lies within the governmental district of East Port of Spain, east of the St. Ann’s River and bound by Lady Young Road on the north, the city limits to the east and the Gulf of Paria to the south.

The area of Gonzales is notorious for deviant and violent act to society within the last decade, yet the population of this area is increasing uncontrollably. With my walk through the area, I saw many houses essentially converted to small shops and clothes stalls with the actual place up residence being at the back of their business or on the second floor of their home.
The structure of the city is principally based around the capital of the nation. The lower-middle class reside there due to ease of access and transportation into the CBD.

Gonzales has undergone a statistically substantial upsurge in the rate of sprawl in the last several decades, and predominantly in the last several years. The trend has led to the large-scale loss of negligible structures and other undeveloped land, and this upsurge in land development has not corresponded proportionately to human population increases. It is therefore population rearrangement that has led to an extensive range of consequences such as crime and land pollution.

 
Crime and Violence

Crime within or on the periphery of the CBD, is usually due to economic inequality. Increasing economic and social polarisation combine to lead to increased lawlessness expressed in racial conflict, violence and crime, despite increased expenditure on police and a growth in private security forces. The variety of people may also lead to the emergence of distinct sub-areas within the slum such as ‘skid rows’ (e.g. Belmont in POS) and ethnic ghettos. Despite the transient and socially dysfunctional nature of the slum population, many organisational features indicate a need for congregation. These include membership of teenage gangs, church communities and ethnic organisations, as well as patronage of particular bars that act as ‘neighbourhood drop-in centres’ where locals can get to know each other, exchange job information and borrow money before payday. For many residents the skid row environment becomes a way of life in which they feel comfortable and secure. 
 

THE HUMAN ECOLOGICAL APPOARCH

The essential premise of the ecological approach is encapsulated in Wirth’s (1938) view that a person’s behaviour is determined by the environment (Pacione 2005, 543). While variations in crime rates over space have long been recognised and current evidence indicates that patterns of these relationships within metropolitan communities have persisted, it is believed that spatial analysis is theoretically inadequate. The norms, behaviours and attitudes should be taken into consideration as many criminologists had made a link between the periphery of a CBD and deviant activity.

In relation to urbanism and sprawl, criminal violations can be analysed as events which occur at specific locations in space and time and involve specific persons. With relation to urban morphology and behaviours, it can be said that the circumstances under which there violations occur are neither random nor trivial, but rather a structurally significant phenomena (Felson and Cohen 1980). Furthermore social structure allows people to translate their criminal inclinations into action. People often migrate due to pull factors such as the illusion of better opportunities and chances to improve standard of living, yet after this move is done and their standard of living have not improved it becomes quite difficult to live, hence the strong community bond among people living in these areas.

Often the middle and high class persons commute to the CBD every day, passing these slums areas along the way. However due to a lack of research, the general public may rarely know how segregated the lower class persons may feel when, the same opportunities are become available yet neglection is a common outcome. These persons may furthermore become so enticed with their visual persona and lifestyle of the upper classes that it can stir up emotions of animosity that may result in spiteful acts to obtain the same material items quickly. These deviant actions may occur for various reasons, such as for the thrill of the moment, as a source of illegal employment or to be initiated into a group or gang.

This phenomenon can be seen throughout the world- Mumbai slum Dharvi in India; the biggest in the world as well in Asia, and also Rio De Janeiro, Brazil are perfect examples of these marginal regions. These areas a characterised by poverty, crime, dirtiness, increasing pollution, increasing black spot, increase in illegal business, increase in prostitution, increase in women crime, increase in drug trafficking, increase in child labour and abuse, increase in diseases, increase in AIDS, increase in slums, pollution, and this is only 1% of problems these slums have. Thomas Hobbes, a moral and political states that men in a state of nature, that is a state without civil government, are in a war of all against all in which life is hardly worth living and the way out of this desperate state is to make a social contract and establish the state to keep peace and order. He believed that the lack of political and social inputs into a community lead to a brutish, violent and short life and these are every so often the facets of sprawls.

All of these can further be exacerbated by unsustainability and lack of planning. Also due the continuous increases of these activities, they cannot be completely eradicated in a fast manner, proper planning and implementation must be done with accordance to the needs of the people. However as the say goes, “You can take the boy out of the area, but you may not be able to take the area out of the boy” unless there is psychological alterations, illegal actions would show its ugly head due to human ecology and the mind-set of the individuals
 

References

Felson, Marcus and Lawrence E. Cohen. 1980. “Human Ecology and Crime: A Routine Activity      Approach”. Volume 8 (4): 389-390

Pacione, Michael. 2005. Urban geography: A Global Perspective. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.