11.5: Cityas Place

In one way, cities are vast, complex machines that produce goods and services, but understanding cities as machines overlooks the very real emotional attachments many people develop for their place of residence. Most people would argue that cities have personalities; qualities that define them as a place. Some city people develop a sort of tribal attitude toward their city. This attitude is reflected most visibly in the fan behaviors and emotions people build around sports teams. It’s not uncommon for citizens of a city to take great offense at derogatory remarks directed toward “their city”, especially if those remarks come from an outsider. The love of a place is called topophilia.

Symbolic Cities

How we know what we know about cities is largely bound up in symbolisms of cities provided us through countless media. Often people have impressive storehouses of knowledge, or at least opinions, about specific cities (New York, Paris, Hollywood) even though they may have never even visited. We also have powerful ideas about generic places like “small towns”, “the suburbs”, “the ghetto”, even though we may not have visited these places. Clearly, this knowledge is imperfect and may very well be dangerously inaccurate to both us and those people who live in these places. It’s important that we recognize how our knowledge of places has been constructed as we seek to understand what purposes these constructions of place serve.

Meinig’s Three Landscapes

Geographer Donald Meinig proposed that Americans have particularly strong ideas and emotions about three special, but generic landscapes: The New England Village, Small Town America, and the California Suburb. Scholars who specialize in the theory of knowledge would suggest these are landscapes are “always already” known; because the symbolism associated with them is deeply engrained in our collective thoughts, even though we are hard-pressed to identify how we came to understand the symbolism associated with these places.

Figure 11-42: Rockville, IN. Small towns across America's heartland represent a kind of generic place that evoke a specific set of notions about American values and norms.

Meinig’s first symbolic landscape is the sleepy New England Village, with its white church and cluster of tidy homes surrounded by hardwood forests is strongly evocative of a lifestyle centered around family, hard work, prosperity, Christianity and community. He called its rival from the American Midwest Main Street USA. This landscape is found in countless small towns. Main Street USA symbolizes order, thrift, industry, capitalism, and practicality. It’s less cohesive and less religious than the New England Village, and more focused on business and government. Finally, Meinig points to the California Suburb as the last of the major urban landscapes deeply embedded in the national consciousness. Suburban California symbolizes the good-life: backyard cookouts with the family and neighbors, a prosperous, healthy lifestyle, centered on family leisure.So powerful are these images that they often appear as settings for novels, movies, television shows as well as political or product advertising campaigns. If you were a manufacturer of high-quality home furnishings, you may want to use the landscape of New England to help sell a well-built dining room table. Insurance companies, like to evoke images of Main Street USA when they want to sign you up for a policy; “like a good neighbor,” they might tell you, hoping you’ll trust the company, despite the fact that its headquarters is not in a small farming town. E.T., the famous movie about a boy who befriends a lost space alien is set in a “typical California suburb”. Like the other symbolic landscapes, movie audiences do not need to have the setting explained to them, they always already know what that place means. Certainly, there are other symbolic American landscapes. Can you think of any?