I think it’s more that in rural areas webs of trust function. You may not know Bob, but your cousin is best friends with his cousin and you know the last name and so since you haven’t heard anything good or bad about him from people you trust who know him he must be an alright fella. And you know Jane just started working with you and she lives in the city but Alice who went to high school with you is saying she’s a good worker and may just be what the company needs so you’ll give her a chance.
This gets them into trouble as this creates a conformity and pushes “deviants” out of their community. “Sam from down the street is Samantha now” provides an opportunity if the town hasn’t yet committed to transphobia, but if it has she’s not longer trustworthy and is prone to harassment, and a very likely scenario is that she’s lauded as a good one and not like most of them. People of color, immigrants, and people of the wrong religion face similar challenges but without the benefit of family and an existing reputation. Ahmed and Fatima have a long uphill battle to be welcomed into a small farming town, even if they’re providing desperately needed skills.
Cities cannot function like this. In many ways they do develop geographically overlapping versions of it, but while you can model a big city queer community or environmentalist scene or whatever subset as a small town web of trust, you can’t function like that in the same way. You will have neighbors you don’t know because your block could have over a hundred families in it. Interpersonal focused charity is demolished at that point. Institutionalized services become vital as do things like multimodal transit systems.
And once you have these institutions and these resources you get the people who can’t get what they need in small towns. Sure the small town has its drug dealers and manufacturers, but only a few do higher level stuff, where the city has a drug trade and gangs. You may have a homeless person or two in a small town, but once they’ve worn out their welcome and stop getting support they’re going to head towards the city where there’s shelters and rehabs and people who didn’t watch them grow up and get sick of giving alms to them.
Small communities are modeled as relationships and responsibilities and people in those places often think rigidly like that. But urban life forces you to think in systems
I think it’s more that in rural areas webs of trust function. You may not know Bob, but your cousin is best friends with his cousin and you know the last name and so since you haven’t heard anything good or bad about him from people you trust who know him he must be an alright fella. And you know Jane just started working with you and she lives in the city but Alice who went to high school with you is saying she’s a good worker and may just be what the company needs so you’ll give her a chance.
This gets them into trouble as this creates a conformity and pushes “deviants” out of their community. “Sam from down the street is Samantha now” provides an opportunity if the town hasn’t yet committed to transphobia, but if it has she’s not longer trustworthy and is prone to harassment, and a very likely scenario is that she’s lauded as a good one and not like most of them. People of color, immigrants, and people of the wrong religion face similar challenges but without the benefit of family and an existing reputation. Ahmed and Fatima have a long uphill battle to be welcomed into a small farming town, even if they’re providing desperately needed skills.
Cities cannot function like this. In many ways they do develop geographically overlapping versions of it, but while you can model a big city queer community or environmentalist scene or whatever subset as a small town web of trust, you can’t function like that in the same way. You will have neighbors you don’t know because your block could have over a hundred families in it. Interpersonal focused charity is demolished at that point. Institutionalized services become vital as do things like multimodal transit systems.
And once you have these institutions and these resources you get the people who can’t get what they need in small towns. Sure the small town has its drug dealers and manufacturers, but only a few do higher level stuff, where the city has a drug trade and gangs. You may have a homeless person or two in a small town, but once they’ve worn out their welcome and stop getting support they’re going to head towards the city where there’s shelters and rehabs and people who didn’t watch them grow up and get sick of giving alms to them.
Small communities are modeled as relationships and responsibilities and people in those places often think rigidly like that. But urban life forces you to think in systems