Let’s say you start somewhere along the western edge of Patterson Park and walk due west, going all the way over to Fulton Avenue. You would navigate this space with a set of mental maps that give meaning to the terrain and the built environment. As you walked you would perform your identity in relation to those around you, based on your people-watching skills and what was going on in the streets and spaces you traversed. You’d have to put on your mask where people weren’t like you. You’d have to know your routine to read the people you came across who were like you, looked like you. And in the spaces where there were all kinds of different folks you’d have to check yourself, be open to possibilities, figure out how to not draw lines between people—particularly the color line with all its historical weight still marking space all over American cities like Baltimore. In those cosmopolitan urban spaces you can choose to live race differently.

Yale sociologist and director of the Urban Ethnography Project Elijah Anderson begins his important new book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (W. W. Norton and Co.), with just such a walk. For Anderson, his walk is across Philadelphia’s Center City, from the Delaware River west to the Schuylkill and the 30th Street Station, Philadelphia’s bustling transportation hub. Anderson has been an anthropologist of Philadelphia for more than 30 years, producing classic interpretations of how race is lived in urban America in works such as Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner City; Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community; and A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men. His new work is nothing less than a map for how race could be lived differently.

Anderson’s walk doesn’t find some post-racial America, but rather—more than 50 years beyond the passage of major civil rights legislation, a movement for racial equality, an influx of new immigrants, and profound economic change—specific spaces within contemporary urban America that offer a possibility for a more perfect union. Anderson writes of these spaces where class and race commingle indiscriminately:

The cosmopolitan canopy and its lessons contribute to an increasingly diverse city. The existence of the canopy allows people, whose strong reference point often remains their own social class or ethic group, a chance to encounter others and so work toward a more cosmopolitan appreciation of difference. In this way, new generations may establish new social patterns . . . As canopies proliferate, such neutral territories may become established elements of the city.

Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and Reading Terminal Market “epitomizes the cosmopolitan canopy,” Anderson writes. Especially at its historic farmer’s market space there is “the great ethnic, racial and class diversity of the city of Philadelphia . . . model[ing] comity and civility for one another, contributing profoundly to the definition of the local situation.”

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