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It is less cohesive and less religious than the New England Village, and more focused on business and government.

This landscape is found in countless small towns, and symbolizes order, thrift, industry, capitalism, and practicality. He called its rival from the American Midwest Main Street USA. Meinig’s first symbolic landscape is the sleepy New England Village, with its steepled white church and cluster of tidy homes surrounded by hardwood forests is powerfully evocative of a lifestyle centered around family, hard work, prosperity, Christianity, and community. Geographer Donald Meinig proposed that Americans have particularly strong ideas and emotions about three unique, but generic landscapes: The New England Village, Small Town America, and the California Suburb (Meinig’s Three Landscapes). We must recognize how our understanding of places has been constructed, and we must seek to understand what purposes these constructions serve. This knowledge is imperfect and may very well be dangerously inaccurate to both those people who live in these places and us. We also have powerful ideas about generic places, “small towns,” “the suburbs,” “the ghetto,” yet though we may not have visited these places either. Often people have enormous storehouses of knowledge about specific places (New York, Paris, Hollywood), even though they have never even visited. How we know what we know about cities is primarily bound up in the symbolism of cities provided us through countless media. It is 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. This attitude is reflected most visibly in the genuine, emotional attachment citizens have to their sports teams. People who live in particular cities often develop a sort of tribal attitude toward their city. Most people would argue that cities have personalities, qualities that define them as a place.

In one way, cities are vast, complex machines that produce goods and services, but that way of conceiving the city overlooks genuine emotional qualities that define almost any location. 10 6.3 Cities as Cultural and Economic Centers Cities as a Place