Gotham's Mirror Reflects American Views of the City

While other caped crusaders may use cities as their playgrounds, and their ills as their raison d'être, none is so deeply connected to his hometown, and no city is as carefully constructed, as Batman's Gotham.  

Through its evolution since the beginning of the series, Gotham has served as "a darkly inflected version of the real-world American 20th
century metropolis," writes Rogers. "All the things anyone
has ever been afraid of about cities-a criminal underclass, monsters in
the sewers, toxic pollution, corrupt politicians, broken
infrastructure-are things Batman fights. He's the fantasy of scared city
kids who wish that a disintegrating urban fabric had a superhero to
stitch it back together."

In its current iteration, The Dark Knight Rises, Gotham is "an urban
amalgam," observes Rogers. "In Nolan's first two Batman movies it was a computer-enhanced
Chicago-a modernist glass-and-steel counterpoint to Burton's version, as
the architect Charles Holland wrote on his blog, Fantastic Journal.
But in the third movie...Nolan's luxurious establishing
shots show a CG-modified New York, several chase sequences take place
along the streets of downtown Los Angeles, and other street-level scenes
were shot in Pittsburgh. It's like [current Batman writer Scott] Snyder said: Locatable but nowhere.
Gotham isn't just any city; it's every city."