Residential mobility prevents urban villages from forming and persisting

Evidence

That the city is not entirely a network of urban villages whose public sectors have a kind of semiprivate character is merely testimony to the strength of forces which operate to destroy them when they are established, or to prevent them from being established in the first place. The restless mobility of the urban population is probably the key factor. Urbanites have so many reasons for moving on, so few reasons for staying put, that many potential urban villages die almost before they are born. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury is a case in point. Given enough years, it might have become a village; the flower children might have grown old together, finding some kind of satisfaction out of creating an oasis of personalism in the desert of impersonality. But they too found more reasons to go than to stay. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 799

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s traversal: mobility dissolves the gemeinschaft preconditions for interpersonal trust, forcing the blasé civil-inattention strategy. — connects to: Corporate accumulation turns inhabited places into zoned Nowheres where residence is lost for generations — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 448