Social Disorganization

Rapid urban migration in Mumbai has packed together people from different regions, languages and castes with no shared history and, often, weak neighbourhood ties. Sociologists have long noticed that exactly this kind of setting — not any single group of ‘bad people’ — correlates with higher rates of crime and social breakdown. That insight is what social disorganization theory tries to explain.

In two minutes

Social disorganization refers to a breakdown in a community's ability to enforce its own shared norms and values, typically caused by rapid social change, and it is used to explain why certain neighbourhoods or communities show persistently higher rates of crime and disorder regardless of who happens to live there.

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