Why broken windows matter

Gravity is good for business. People are always dropping their phones, the assistant tells me, especially the iPhone 4. I’ve brought mine here to the iPhone repair shop in the middle of klinkerbrick Nowheresville in North Riding. I was expecting a dodgy hole in the wall, and it looks like a dodgy hole in the wall from the outside – but inside it’s all minimalist white floor, black couch and cappuccinos while you wait. Fifteen minutes and R2 500 later and my phone is like new.

Ouch. Hey, I knew I was in for a large whack of cash, which is why I took so long to getting around to having it fixed. I’d been walking around with a smashed screen ever since I’d dropped the damn thing onto slasto nearly three months before. Cracks radiated from the top left-hand corner in an arpeggio of destruction that was truly heartrending to witness. Close to the point of impact, little shards of screen flaked away to reveal the metal beneath. It was horrible; people would literally shudder when they saw what I’d done to it. But since the damage didn’t stop me from tweeting or SMSing or anything else I do with the phone (including, very rarely, using it for actual phone calls), I could get away with procrastinating.

In the end, I had the phone repaired not because it stopped working; it worked just fine. No, I had it repaired because that screen was starting to get me down. The effect was much the same as a broken window, and broken windows are depressing. Left unrepaired, the general decline they symbolise with mute eloquence eventually infects an entire building, then an entire place, even an entire city.

This is not just a case of me and my large and growing collection of Issues. There’s a sizeable body of discussion on the “broken window effect”. First described by James Q Wilson in 1982, this theory holds that if you allow a broken window to go unrepaired, you allow a culture of criminal behaviour to take root. It was this theory that inspired Rudy Giuliani’s much-discussed approach to tackling crime in New York City in the 1990s. There’s scientific evidence that broken windows and other forms of disorder do have a psychological impact on us. An experiment in the Netherlands reported in The Economist in 2008 suggested that disorder does encourage criminal behaviour. Let the little things go, and eventually bigger things follow.

Living with a broken window is rather like driving around in a car with a ding, or walking around in public with a hole in your T-shirt. Slowly, slowly, those external imperfections worm their way into our inner selves. There’s a rational argument for being tidy, clearing up litter, sprucing a building up with a lick of paint. Even leaving the dishes unwashed can make us miserable. This extends to our physical selves: sometimes, putting on lipstick or getting our hair done is a surprisingly effective treatment for depression.

The crack in the screen was a daily reminder, if you will, of my failure to fix the cracks in my life. Having to look at that smashed screen eroded my happiness. Having forked out to have my phone fixed, I will have to wear Mr Price and give up food for the foreseeable future. But it’s worth it. My phone is my window to the world, and being able to look through something that isn’t broken once more has dramatically improved my view of life.

Sometimes, it’s better not to let the cracks show.