"City Lights Journal"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the book, "City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society" by E. Barbara Phillips. It looks at how the first two chapters deal primarily with ways of understanding urban studies and how how Chapters Four and Five seem to deal primarily with the nature of cities and the various typologies by which they are understood. Chapters Six and Seven deal with the way citizens seek the connection and community that is often absent from urban life. It also discusses how, while still focusing almost exclusively on American culture, Chapters Eight and Nine deal more extensively with the multicultural aspects of this culture and the way in which global identity and culture interacts with the city dynamic. It also shows how Chapters Eleven and Twelve seem to deal with social life and theory as a sort of complex gaming system by which individuals are stratified into economic and social classes and how Chapters Twelve and Thirteen deal with the question: "Who runs this town?", an extensive overview of the different sorts of governments that may be in charge of a city and their relationship to national governance.

From the Paper:

"One of the more interesting points that Phillips makes in the progress of explaining why no single discipline can entirely explain urban phenomena is that of the existence of "cognitive maps." In this section, she describes the way in which individuals will consistently leave out whole sections of their city or town when asked to draw maps or describe it. This is because of the natural myopic vision of individuals when it comes to defining their worlds. Those things that are out of mind are out of sight. Apparently the same is true with those studying urban issues from the myopic viewpoint of a single discipline. This idea raises a lot of interesting questions regarding the feasibility of urban studies in general, and also about the nature of the institutions built on single disciplines."

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