Every now and again I mention a book I'm reading, especially if it's interesting.  This week I finished Elijah Anderson's nice The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York, WW Norton, 2011), and I thought I'd just mention it.

The book is a thoughtful study of the central area of Philadelphia, which Anderson calls “the cosmopolitan canopy.” This is a region of public space which is outside of any particular communities explicit control, and in which different people appear, and do not appear to one another as threats in any way. He literally takes us on a walking tour, more or less from west to east, through various selected sites in Philly’s Center city, using them to reflect on the complications of public space, class, and especially race in a contemporary American city. You get a sense of what it would be like to take a walking sociology seminar with Anderson, and it seems to me like that would be an experience well worth your while.

I like this book both for its descriptive ethnography (something Anderson’s other books have as well, from my memory of his A Place on the Corner) and for its light touch, but secure command, of the sociological literature is in which his work can be positioned. You learn a lot about the traditions of urban sociology by following along with the footnotes, and what’s more, this is not merely a scholastic learning: he actually puts that learning to use, by showing us how that tradition illuminates what we see before our eyes.

The basic story that he tells is that the cosmopolitan canopy can work for everybody, and often does so work, but that especially Black people still exist there under surveillance, and things can go south for them at any time. It is a good analysis, it seems to me, of our public sphere, attending to space and sensitive to particular rising details such as different times of the day. All in all, it seems to me a very useful book, both for understanding the world we live in, and for understanding a century old tradition of sociology that illuminates that world.

This is an interesting book in the tradition of urban sociology going back to Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth, with some real attention to the “Chicago School” of sociology in general. I’ll share this with my friends Elisabeth, who’s a sociologist of urban places, among other things, and Garnette, who is a writer thinking about city life, race, and walking. They’ll both enjoy it, if they don’t know it already.

It also struck me as a really nice model of how to write a book which is simultaneously responsible to scholarship and also accessible to a wider public.  It's an exercise in "middle range theory," a strategy of connecting abstract "theory" (in this case, I'd say, theory spanning urban sociology, sociology of race and identity, and sociology of the public) with an empirical "data set" (here, Philly's Center City).  I wonder if there is some sort of “tour” like this—of a place? a tradition? something?—that a religion scholar might be able to do, and bring other people along for the ride.

Anyway, just something for you.  It's great to have sociologists who write careful but accessible books; this is one.