There are a million stories in the naked city.

That line closes the 1948 classic film noir The Naked City.¹ The film, drenched in shadow and filled with the grit and swelter of a hot city summer, is a crime story set in New York. The movie, innovatively filmed in the city itself, out in the open, without stage sets, also purports to be, as the narrator explains, a story about the city. Its closing line, uttered by that same narrator over scenes of the city at night, has always struck me as the most astute characterization of any city:...

It is fair to say, I think, that no other American city is still so thoroughly identified with its founder as Philadelphia is with William Penn. Bostonians might remember John Winthrop’s connection to the founding of their city, and New Yorkers have named a high school after Peter Stuyvesant, but Philadelphians live and work, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of William Penn. His statue, all thirty-six feet and twenty-six tons of it, gazes upon his city from the top of City Hall tower, and his name is attached to everything, from the Penn City Elevator Company to the state...

The moviemaker M. Night Shyamalan has provided another kind of imaginative geography, a decidedly spooky one, for Greater Philadelphia. Shyamalan himself lives on Philadelphia’s Main Line and he has set—and filmed—all his movies in the region. Through Shyamalan’s lens, Bucks County has become a place of weird crop circles, and nineteenth-century Chester County the home to a plagued village.

Shyamalan broke into the national movie scene in 1999 with his wildly successful film The Sixth Sense. The plot revolves around Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), an eight-year-old boy who is haunted by ghosts, and Dr. Malcolm Crow (Bruce...

I play a game with my students: Raise your hand if you are middle class. All hands invariably go up.

And there it is. We are all middle class in America. I have heard doctors and lawyers, whose annual incomes top half a million dollars, insist that they too are middle class. It is more central to our sense of ourselves than apple pie, baseball, or moms.

The purpose of my game, of course, is precisely to get my students to examine just a bit more closely what we mean by middle class and just what constitutes membership in it....

Sitting at his window in 1789 the Reverend Dr. Duche, a visitor from England to the new nation of the United States, wrote a “Description of Philadelphia” for readers of the American Museum. He looked out over the “majestic Delaware” to the woods on the “opposite shore of New Jersey . . . clothed in their brightest verdure,” which afforded his eyes “a pleasing rest and refreshment . . . after it has glanced across the watry mirror.” While the good reverend doctor found the city only extended about half a mile from the shore of the Delaware, he told...

Boathouse Row with the lights on. The Liberty Bell. The Art Museum. Independence Hall. William Penn on top of City Hall’s tower.

All of these symbolize Philadelphia. They function visually as instantly recognizable shorthand for the city, and as such tend to get used whenever quick visual cues are necessary: ad campaigns, promo shots on TV, filler during broadcasts of Philadelphia sporting events.

They serve their purpose well because they are visually compelling and because they are, each of them, distinctive. In the blink of an eye, they signal “Philadelphia” and no place else. After all, most important American cities...

For the last fifty years we have told roughly the same story about metropolitan America in the Northeast and the Midwest. In the postwar period, those suburbs have grown, proliferated, and thrived, while the cities at the centers of those regions have declined, decayed, and been eclipsed by the rising cities of the South and West.

It is hard to argue with the numbers, so let’s do a quick review. America urbanized dramatically over the nineteenth century, hand in glove with the rise of the industrial economy. When the nation was founded in Philadelphia, probably over 90 percent of the...