Urban neglect and broken windows
The ‘broken windows’ theory traces back to a 1969 experiment by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Two similar cars were left in different neighbourhoods. One was in the Bronx, then a deprived area of New York City with serious problems. The other was in Palo Alto, an affluent, quiet part of California. Within hours the Bronx car was being stripped. Anything valuable was taken and the rest was smashed. Days passed and the Palo Alto car remained untouched, until the researchers broke one of its windows. It was then vandalised as heavily as the Bronx car, with the same result.
James Wilson and George Kelling later developed the broken windows theory. If a broken window in a building is left unrepaired, more will gradually appear. It sends a message that nobody cares and rules and laws are absent, so the rules of living together begin to break down. The same happens with graffiti. Once a blank wall is tagged, the whole wall can soon be covered. The same idea applies to dog fouling and pets urinating in public spaces.
The theory can be applied to many parts of life, from work and social relationships to looking after ourselves. It can also be applied to urban planning, and specifically to Alicante’s southern gateway, which we want to look at here.
Perhaps the broken windows theory helps explain why Alicante’s southern gateway is in such a sorry state of neglect and underinvestment. Ruins that have stood for decades keep deteriorating in areas whose development plans were approved long ago. Tree pits stand empty where there used to be trees. Council services and facilities are missing from sites that have lain vacant for more than 30 years. There are roads where there should be green spaces, disused tracks on land full of weeds, rubbish and makeshift shelters for people in poverty, inaccessible parks such as Parque del Mar, half-demolished listed buildings including part of the former Benalúa station and its outbuildings, graffiti everywhere, inadequate public transport, beaches closed to bathing and a seafront held hostage by an obsolete railway line. The list goes on. It is a picture of profound neglect to which, sadly, most of our leaders and Alicante residents themselves seem to have grown accustomed.
Misery breeds misery, just as rubbish attracts more rubbish. That is why an area, or even a whole city, can so easily go from having ‘enormous potential’, as people always say about the southern gateway, to becoming run-down and mediocre.
Progress in a neighbourhood or a city does not happen by itself, however much some people might like to believe it. The opposite is true, especially in underfunded places such as the Valencian Community, Alicante and its southern gateway, which is the poorest of the poor. Improving an area takes hard work. It is like driving a car uphill: either you accelerate or you roll backwards. At Alicante’s southern gateway we need to accelerate hard, because the car is in worse shape every day and has fewer parts left. There is a great deal of time to make up. Too many trains have already left and too many opportunities have been lost in this part of the city. Worse still is the human cost. I know more and more people who have grown old or died waiting for the southern gateway’s potential to become a reality instead of promises that never came to anything.
It is time for this city to wake up. Residents and politicians need to work together and stop tripping one another up. It takes a lot of energy to keep things moving, and we cannot afford to waste it on fruitless quarrels.
At the Parque del Mar Neighbourhood Association, we work and will keep working to repair the ‘broken windows’ of Alicante’s southern gateway. There are many of them, and they have been broken for too many years waiting for someone to fix them.
