unfair representations

According to reliable sources on the Internet, this is a view of Dover, Delaware. If you were to ask me if I thought this was actually Dover, I would not be able to reply honestly.

This looks like a picture of an ordinary, pleasant, functional, and possibly unique downtown streetscape in "middle" America.

This is not the Dover, Delaware that I recently experienced on a trip this summer. That Dover, which I have no pictures of, consisted of a few feeder roads off of an interstate highway that led to a four lane strip that was so thoroughly American in its banality that it was almost a work of art. There were examples of every franchise and box store that was trying to survive the Great Recession. Every building was surrounded by an ocean of parking lots, mostly empty. The only original architecture was the NASCAR racetrack and the campus of Delaware State University--which was well hidden from the road and was a miniature city unto itself.

But this scene of a Dover that exists somewhere else is an equivalent expression of banality. We cannot prove where it is, just as we cannot prove where the Dover I visited IS. This streetscape would satisfy a New Urbanist, and its existence is no doubt reassuring to the people who live there. Perhaps it is subsidized by the volume of commercial development along the strip. I can only conclude, if they are both real, then they are both legitimate.