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don't know where you are in working your way through the syllabus....

last you left me it was looking like this...

...and/but I wanted to add a few more notes here. I've gotten intrigued by the collection you recommended, Philip Stevick's Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). I like the way he describes descriptions: 

travelers…all carry…an immense load of experiential and cultural baggage that disposes them to “read” a place in a particular way, to see things that are scarcely there, and to be unable to see other things, even though they may be staring straight at them…there are as many Philadelphias as there are observers of the city…how idiosyncratic travel, and writing about it…are….visiting Philadelphia has always had about it a fluid, indeterminate quality….

older, more complicated cities have a diverse and vivid collection of iconic images that are likely to precede anyone’s visit there….And each of those epitomizing images is likely to evoke a dimension of longing in the traveler…it is possible to manipulate one’s field of vision so as to replicate the image held in the mind….Philadelphia is not like that…So…Philadelphia is…a carte blanche for the visitor….

 …the versions of Philadelphia that seem most engaging, most plainly interesting for our century, contain two simultaneous levels of response to the city. One is a tangible, sensory immersion in the life of the physical city, a sense…that Philadelphia was really visited, at street level, on a specific time during a particular journey. The other level is a mythic, transformative response, in which a visit to Philadelphia becomes the occasion for a play of mind, a complex act of the imagination, so that...the report of the visit becomes fictive…an invention, something “made up”….

Stevick also led me to George Simmels' "magisterial" 1950 description of the relation of the city to self, The Metropolis and Mental Life, which is intriguing, and troubling (and which I've just folded in, early on, to our already-overfull syllabus, so there!). Simmels says, in part,

The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli….the metropolitan type…creates a protective organ for itself again the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it….There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved to the city as the blasé outlook….The mental attitude of the people of the metropolis to one another may be designated formally as one of reserve….It assures the individual of …personal freedom….The most significant aspect of the metropolis lies in [its] functional magnitude beyond its actual physical boundaries and this…gives to it life, weight, importance and responsibility….the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere….. Cities are above all the seat of the most advanced economic division of labor…..The decisive factor here is that in the life of a city, struggle with nature for the means of life is transformed into a conflict with human beings….The necessity to specialize…is conducive to differentiation, refinement and enrichment….This leads ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravagances…the meaning of which is…to be found…in…’being different’—of making oneself noticeable….the metropolis places emphasis on striving for the most individual forms of personal existence….From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests….present themselves from all sides….But from another angle, life is composed more and more of these impersonal cultural elements…which seek to suppress peculiar personal interests…..When both of these forms of individualism…are nourished by the quantitative relationships of the metropolis…..the metropolis attains an entirely new value and meaning in the world history of the spirit.