Adults continue learning urban place-knowledge through word of mouth

Evidence

As I have said, such word-of-mouth instruction continues through adulthood. A young male reports that he would not walk through the Tenderloin district of San Francisco alone at night because he has a friend who was robbed there. A woman started going to a certain restaurant because someone told her that unescorted females would not be bothered. And another woman learns what the people are like in a certain section of the city through a new neighbor who has just “escaped” the horrors of that area’s schools. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 578

Categorization

• XREF: Adjacent to research on reputation systems in trade (Milgrom, the Law Merchant) — word-of-mouth place knowledge substitutes for direct experience in both urban navigation and commerce.
• SEED: Angle: word-of-mouth as the urban cognitive infrastructure — how hearsay about neighborhoods, schools, and districts functions as a distributed map that shapes real movement and travel behavior.