Ugliness and the city

The results are in, and Philly has the ugliest people out of 25 American cities in a CNN/Travel and Leisure poll. Second ugliest? Washington, D.C. Apparently I've been hanging out in the wrong cities if I'm looking for the beautiful people. Philly also ranks 23rd for a category called "People (overall)." What exactly this means I'm not really sure. How can you possibly rank a city's population as a monolithic whole anyway?

Beyond the rather laughable methodology of this study (the rankings are based on people who have visited the city, but it doesn't appear that they asked how recently that visit was), I wonder if it's even possible to consider a city as one place in the way this study does. West Philly is vastly different from Center City, which in turn has little in common with South Philly. Tourist areas of a city are one thing, but large cities in America are so diverse--and, in turn, segregated--that it's often hard to make generalizations.

A kind of disturbing post on Gawker (a NYC blog) basically argued that what makes a city ugly is how many poor people live there. Wow. Another blogger suggests that people are just prejudiced towards blonds and Philly doesn't have enough. Maybe it's all the time I spend doing criticism for school, but I think this study should be taken with a giant spoonful of salt.