PHOENIX — On “King of the Hill,” the animated sitcom that aired for 13 years on Fox, the character named Peggy Hill once called Phoenix “a monument to man’s arrogance.” Last summer, on a day the temperature broke records at 115 degrees, someone posted a segment on Reddit under the thread “Phoenix, Arizona, should not exist.”

And that is just a small taste of the disrespect often heaped on the nation’s sixth-largest city.

One scholar has called it “the world’s least sustainable city.” Vice, in an article on how Phoenix is the “worst place ever,” described it as “a bloated tangle of tasteless architecture that never seems to stop ballooning outward.” Even Daehee Park, the co-founder of a start-up here and an admirer of the place, used the not particularly complimentary phrase “strip mall after strip mall after strip mall” to describe Phoenix, which, with wide roads and gated communities, is more like a giant suburb than a traditional city.

Phoenix is the way it is largely because of where it is, in a sprawling desert. It became a place of huge growth, where people from colder climes flocked for affordable single-family homes where air conditioning was de rigueur and not a single garage had to make room for a snow blower.