Sustainable Communities

Recently, there has been an initiative by the government to look at the communities we live in and try and make them sustainable. They do this by transforming the area that maybe in need of transformation and make it somewhere that people want to live and stay. For many a parts of the country, they are in need of transforming, especially areas that have been documented in the media, like in documentaries or the news.

This is an example of people in an area of dire need of transforming due to recent events in the past few years:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7878360.stm

For the area I was living for the past 18 and a half years, it has been transformed over the years. It was never really a great place to live, with people who were behaving anti-socialably and crime at a level which was just below the average. But today, it has been transformed into an area where people would like to live. From experience, there are now people who belong in that area and do their upmost to keep it safe and clean for the residents and even visitors of the area.
For the 5 points on which the government think a sustainable community is (to be found here: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/pdf/143600.pdf Page 5), I think that the area that i used to live in ticks all them boxes. It has such great neighbourhood spirit with everyone knowing everyone.

My Area is situated in Ward Peterborough 017C, which there are 1,577 people living in, and the majority are males at 795, but only by about 13 with females at 782. It is a healthy area to live in, with 69.63% of the people living there are in good general health. There are 726 households in the area and the majority of people living there either have 1 or no cars in the household. This can be seen due to the good public transport in the area and since it very close to the town centre. There is also just over half of the amount of people in the area are either single or married, with 760 people being classed as single and 459 being classed as married.
As for crime, there is very little as can be seen with only 3 total fire incidents in the area, which could be crime or could be accidental. For education, 47.4% of all students received 5+ A*-C at GCSE and this is not above the national average, due to the secondary schools being quite far, but from personal experience, many students did not have a problem travelling such a long distance to get to school every day. There is one primary and one infant school in the area which both have a very good record for education, due to experience, and this is reflected from when they move onto KS3/4 where they are not far behind the national average.

Although there are a lot of positive things about the area, there are areas of the ward where improvement is needed, especially with anti-socialable behaviour in a set of council flats which have been a problem for years. The local council has not seemed to grasp this and need to help the people who live there with new inititatives to help boost the local area and bring something back to the community.

(http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/NeighbourhoodSummary.do?width=1280&a=3&r=1&i=1001&m=0&s=1236933577915&enc=1&profileSearchText=PE2+9AN&searchProfiles=Search)