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Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Omahahonors
I'm going to go out on a limb and say all cities have a unique identity. If one was to study each city, there would be a startling separation in history, thought and fortunes.
I say this thread is a good way to re-learn our stereotypical viewpoints.
I agree 100%.
This thread is indicative of a bias on this forum of people who view life through a prism of certain cities "not counting". The last time I checked there are no cities filled with zombies, so that means every city will have an unique identity. Whether it is small or unappealing to an individual is irrelevant to the fact that one in fact exists.
All this thread serves to do is show how little people know about the world. Kind of sad really.
This thread is indicative of a bias on this forum of people who view life through a prism of certain cities "not counting". The last time I checked there are no cities filled with zombies, so that means every city will have an unique identity. Whether it is small or unappealing to an individual is irrelevant to the fact that one in fact exists.
All this thread serves to do is show how little people know about the world. Kind of sad really.
Yes. One of the things I find interesting about travelling throughout the country, is that places where I previously hadn't expected much from, turn out to have interesting local cultures and quirks... It must be boring to simply base your understanding of places on a few stereotypes and not actually explore those places. For example, personally I love traveling to the South, because there are so many regional variations. Just trying all the different BBQ styles going through the Carolinas into Georgia is cool, or all the little regional music scenes and styles(both historic and current music). The Applachians feel different than the low country of South Carolina and so on. Or the different accents you hear in certain cities in the Northeast and Midwest...
Now identity is tied up to more than just food or sports or whatever. And I think regional cultures have been declining on some part in the US due to this homogenized mass market culture that is common these days. But even in the Western US, where culturally things are more consistent in some ways over a greater area(more of an urban liberal/rural conservative divide)--you find a lot of unique things. There are things in a lot of cities that only a native or someone who's lived there a long time would recognize and identify with...
Charlotte
Tulsa
Indianapolis
Sioux City
Colorado Springs
Lubbock
Topeka
Dayton
Harrisburg
Rochester
Huntsville
Bismarck
Bakersfield
Spokane
Knoxville
Jefferson City
Wichita
Little Rock
Without thinking about it much at all, here's what comes to mind with some of the cities on your list.
Charlotte - NASCAR, banking
Colorado Springs - Pikes Peak, famously libertarian
Lubbock - Texas Tech, Buddy Holly, frontier history
Dayton - many important 20th century inventions have their history here
Huntsville - haven't you heard of NASA?
Bakersfield - Okies, oil
Knoxville - University of Tennessee, Appalachia
I'm saying that identity is subjective. There is not a database of city identities. What people most commonly identify the city with is what becomes the identity.
Ask a person in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, North Dakota, Seattle, Phoenix or New York City what they think of when they hear "Charleston".
Most probably couldn't even tell you what a palmetto is.
I don't see what happened 250 years ago in a city has to do with the image of a city today unless it still shows that character throughout rather than in a district that occupies less than half of the developed space of the city.
Today's Charleston and Savannah are bland to myself and many others.
Then I would start a thread about how Charleston and Savannah don't do justice today to the respective identities they've built over the years. And maybe say why (hint: try a little harder than saying they have a Taco Bell and a Wal-Mart). Or a thread about why your meaning of "identity" is different from everyone else's, and why that's good.
If that is what people in the west think of Detroit then that is the perceived identity. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVITY IN THE IDENTITY OF A PLACE. It is entirely perception of qualitative traits, if any are even apparent.
Outside of the south, yes, because their influence and identity are not strong enough to make themselves known.
Identity is defined as "The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known."
It's not defined as "what I think of when I think of a thing."
The former is, in a sense, totally objective. Identity is what other people think you are.
San Jose! Any city that deserves to be on this thread is San Jose since nobody knows anything about San Jose. San Jose is a city with no identity, according to everyone.
When I think identity, I think of things like city specific foods, city specific accents or sayings, landmarks, major historical figures
Places that seemed to lack these things for me were
Charlotte
Raleigh Dayton
Virginia Beach
Places listed such as Savannah, St Louis , Charleston have these things, or at least several
Paul Lawrence Dunbar would probably disagree with you. So would the Wright Brothers, if they were still alive and were perusing Internet messaging boards instead of inventing the airplane.
And Dayton is the home of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, a major museum that Savannah, St. Louis and Charleston could only dream of. It's where you can see such things as the Bockscar (the plane that dropped the Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki in 1945) and Apollo 15 command module, among hundreds of other notable aircraft. And it's the only place you can walk onto presidential planes, including Harry Truman's plane and Air Force One aboard which LBJ was sworn into office as Jackie Kennedy sat next to JFK's body en route from Dallas to Washington and used by every president from JFK to Bill Clinton.
If only Dayton had important landmarks like Savannah.
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