Last week, we discussed Anderson’s work on the cosmopolitan canopy. With my expert question, I asked if cosmopolitan canopies are ultimately more helpful or harmful for community building and if we can use the framework of the cosmopolitan canopy to understand social media communities. While discussing this question, Professor Greene asked us to define, what is a cosmopolitan canopy? While we were looking for a definition, what ensued was a conversation, and some disagreement, about what spaces and places would qualify as cosmopolitan canopies.

In the article “The Cosmopolitan Canopy,” Anderson explains that people in cities have developed, “a pervasive wariness towards strangers” (Anderson, 15). However, through his ethnographic work in Philadelphia, he claims that there are certain places, he terms them cosmopolitan canopies, that break this trend of wariness. In these places, people are treated with “a certain level of civility” regardless of their identity and they are able to partake in “folk ethnography.”

While it might seem like many places in an urban setting could qualify as a cosmopolitan canopy, in our class discussion we realized this definition might be harder to fit to a place than suggested by Anderson in his article. I still question the existence of places where people of every identity feel neutral and secure. It seems likely to me that even if people are physically safe and engaging in simple small talk, people of marginalized identities might still be feeling wary. For example, Anderson offers an interaction where “a white man with white-supremacist friends” has a “frank conversation” (Anderson, 20) with Anderson in the Market.  While the man was comfortable talking to Anderson, Anderson does not say whether he himself was comfortable in that space hearing that this man had friends with such views and might hold those views as well. My point is that I am not convinced from our discussion or Anderson’s article that people of different backgrounds feel equally secure and neutral in these spaces.

From this discussion, our class then moved on to wonder, is Bowdoin a cosmopolitan canopy?  I think that the concept of the Bowdoin hello is useful in addressing this question because I believe it shows that while the administration might try to make Bowdoin a cosmopolitan canopy, the space does not fit the definition in reality. The Bowdoin hello is the idea that here at Bowdoin, campus members do not engage in the wariness that Anderson uses to describe urbanites and instead we regularly say hello and engage in small talk with any stranger they might see on campus. However, any Bowdoin community member would tell you that this simply is not true. We do not go around saying hello to every person we see walking by and often times you will see people, “employing elaborate facial and eye work, replete with smiles, nods and gestures geared to carve out an impersonal but private zone for themselves” (Anderson, 15). In this way, I think the concept of the Bowdoin hello and lack of practice illustrates how in reality, despite how we might want to appear, we are not a cosmopolitan canopy.

However, while I was reading Anderson I did recognize many parallels between the Market and Thorne dining hall, most especially Thorne Dining hall during the power outage this week. People in this time and space did talk to strangers and feel safe sharing space with people they might not have known. With this observation I wonder, is common experience the key to achieving relative neutrality and civility? Is eating the same food, or surviving the same storm what allowed us to relate to each other, even if only in a superficial way? Thus, are canopies just the places where there are commonalities strong enough to bring us together but not so niche that they keep out certain groups? I also wonder, if Thorne dining hall is not always a cosmopolitan canopy but only was one during the storm, is there a temporal element to this concept? Can places be canopies during an event and then lose this element of their existence?

In our class discussion about the High Line we talked about theories of political economy and the physical features of the park, but one of our largely unanswered questions was, what is the point of the High Line? In this post, I propose that individual visitors to the High Line, agents in the High Line’s development and the City of New York use and associate with the High Line to gain status.

The High Line is not a large plot of open grassy space nor does it offer many places to sit and stay. Instead, it is a long, elevated and linear pathway that winds by a selection of carefully curated art and food vendors.  In class, those who have visited the High Line commented that even accessing the vendors is difficult because of the constant flow of people along the path. So, are people visiting this place just to walk through it? In the most general sense the answer must be no, because if people visited the High Line for the sole purpose of walking they could be doing that on any sidewalk in Manhattan. There must be something that people are getting from the experience of walking on this particular pathway. I propose that people are going to the High Line for the status that occupying the space gives them. Recently, multiple social media platforms such as Instagram and Snap Chat have become increasingly location based with features such as geofilters and location tags. In the age of this specific type of social media, people can track and show others where they have been. As a result, the locations that we associate ourselves with through social media become part of our online presence and identity. Therefore, when people associate themselves with a place, such as the High Line, that is perceived as popular and cool their own status is elevated.

The framework of the political economy provides us with “five areas of agreement” about urban spaces. One of these areas is the importance of government and politics and another point is that actors, such as individuals or corporations, can impact urban environments.  Loughran’s piece on the High Line mentions the co-founders of Friends of the High Line, Josh David and Robert Hammond, multiple times. Lourghran mentions that, “the initial meeting between David and Hammond has … taken on mythic status” (55) and that the co-founders have written a book about their High Line project. In founding Friends of the High Line, David and Hammond not only became major actors in shaping a piece of New York but also gained a degree of notoriety and status for their work in the park’s development. Part of my expert question asked about the role that the non-profit plays in navigating between local politics, corporate desires and the public good. There are many ways David and Hammond could have gone about developing the High Line, and yet they chose to start a non-profit. Why might these two have chosen to do this work through the founding of a non-profit organization? Why are they working with politicians and government through the non-profit rather than, for example, running for office? Why might they be affiliating with corporate brands through Friends of the High Line rather than as private investors buying the High Line as property and renting out commercial space? How might doing this work through Friends of the High Line elevate their status and allow them to work more flexibly with major agents such as corporations and local government?

Urban political economy also reminds us that cities are part of a competing global hierarchy and, as industry is being traded in for idea economies, people have more flexibility in choosing where they live. Now that people are not necessarily being drawn to urban centers to work in factories, what is drawing people to spend time in and live in urban centers? We have discussed multiple reasons why people might want to live in or visit a city, but in a time when the factories a city contains do not define its utility, what factors make one city more attractive or competitive than another? I wonder how cities might be trying to use projects like the High Line to develop and curate an individual aesthetic that is meant to make the city a more unique and thus desirable attraction.