ABSTRACT
This chapter first deals with a variety of urban settings where different styles and views of mobility have developed. For that, it discusses the symbolic representations of cities and their linked images of success and failure, and reviews the course of American urbanization. The cities are equally diverse when examined in terms of their populations, their social structures, and their psychological atmospheres. Presumably they also are diversely patterned in their mobility possibilities or probabilities, and in their predominant symbolizations or mobility. The chapter then deals with persistent clusters of urban imagery (such as the city as dehumanizing, and the city as a place of stable community life). In the discussion of these imageries and urban settings, the main variable of urbanization is crosscut by the usual processual and ideational variables. Some of the persistent clusters of urban imagery are relatively independent of region or type of American city. These differentially dominate the thinking of various urban populations.
