Mobile home park on the prairie: a new rural community form.

摘要

A rural central mobile home park in Illinois, USA, and its residents seemingly possess features (a distinct territory, a homogeneous population, and a collectively held rural ideology) that foster formation of a sense of community. Other factors, however, some unique to this relatively new rural residential form, present physical and social barriers that challenge park residents' construction of a sense of community. We use ethnographic data, based on a survey of households (n=85) in 1998, to describe daily life in a rural mobile home park and to determine who among its working-poor residents are most able to construct a sense of community, and thus to gain access to the potentially beneficial community social resources that are crucial to makinga difference in the quality of their lives.