Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
Mobility, it is evident, involves change, new experience, stimulation.
Stimulation induces a response of the person to those objects in his
environment which afford expression for his wishes. For the person, as
for the physical organism, stimulation is essential to growth. Response
to stimulation is wholesome so long as it is a correlated _integral_
reaction of the entire personality. When the reaction is _segmental_,
that is, detached from, and uncontrolled by, the organization of
personality, it tends to become disorganizing or pathological. That is
why stimulation for the sake of stimulation, as in the restless pursuit
of pleasure, partakes of the nature of vice.
The mobility of city life, with its increase in the number and intensity
of stimulations, tends inevitably to confuse and to demoralize the
person. For an essential element in the mores and in personal morality
is consistency, consistency of the type that is natural in the social
control of the primary group. Where mobility is the greatest, and where
in consequence primary controls break down completely, as in the zone of
deterioration in the modern city, there develop areas of demoralization,
of promiscuity, and of vice.
In our studies of the city it is found that areas of mobility are also
the regions in which are found juvenile delinquency, boys’ gangs, crime,
poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, vice.
These concrete situations show why mobility is perhaps the best index of
the state of metabolism of the city. Mobility may be thought of in more
than a fanciful sense, as the “pulse of the community.” Like the pulse
of the human body, it is a process which reflects and is indicative of
all the changes that are taking place in the community, and which is
susceptible of analysis into elements which may be stated numerically.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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