“Describe Some of the Ways in Which Order Is Made and Repaired on a Street Which You Know”

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Assignment: “Describe some of the ways in which order is made and repaired on a street which you know” In the Making Social Lives DVD, particularly the ‘Ordered lives’ film order is seen in many different ways. Rules that are both enshrined in law and those that are simply ‘social norms’ are both adhered to and broken. The street I will be looking at for this assignment is Northumberland Street in Newcastle upon Tyne. I will be looking at how social order is maintained in both seen and unseen ways. The making of social order is to do with the way people live their lives, the customs they may bring from their backgrounds and ethnic cultures and ideas about the past and the future, language, culture and behaviour. Social is constantly changing as new people, ideas and acceptable practices come about in society. As we saw, on City Road in Cardiff “People’s lives are ordered in a host of different ways, both visible and invisible” (Ordered Lives, 2009, scene 1) In Northumberland Street people adhere to order in much the same way. Firstly they adhere to the official rules and regulations of the street as laid out by the street signs and markers. Until 1999, the most northerly section of Northumberland Street from Northumberland Road onwards was still open to traffic which led to the shops in this part of the street being much less popular than those farther south. (Wikipedia, accessed March 2013). People who use bicycles do not ride down the street as it is a pedestrian only zone. There are no physical barriers in place to stop them doing this, but signs are in place at various access points warning of the regulations. We could look at this and ask why are the barriers needed? Why can car drivers not be trusted to obey traffic signs and signals in the same way as bike riders. This does not seem to make sense as car drivers can be much more heavily

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