Abstract
Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee provides a nuanced analysis of the socio-spatial processes that have shaped the uneven development of a small, Southern city. Deploying the conceptual scaffolding of diasporic placemaking, “conceived as the vast set of creative, everyday place-making practices through which [historically] uprooted people plant cultural and material roots” (p. 186), Knapp traces the ways in which Chattanooga has evolved since its beginning and up to the current era characterized by many parallel issues of uneven placemaking. Through this lens, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie aims to reconsider “urban development and change through a multidiasporic place-making frame . . . to illuminate patterns of development and stories of place that have been racialized and otherwise differentiated and ordered across a vast network of political and economic opportunity structures” (p. 187). The book provides a historical-geographic argument that the production of present-day Chattanooga is intimately linked to former eras of racialized placemaking. Throughout different eras, Knapp contrasts the efforts of urban elites to portray Chattanooga throughout time as a cosmopolitan locale alongside the reality that many (racialized) groups experience the city as anything but progressive. As such, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie also foregrounds resistance movements that, over different eras, have contested Chattanooga’s uneven development and enacted their own spatial practices aimed at creating a place called home even in the context of deeply disadvantaging urban planning practices that have privileged white, property-owning citizens. Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie not only serves as urban historiography but also demonstrates how a diasporic placemaking approach is more than an academic exercise. Rather, it is a powerful frame with which organizing and activism might benefit through storytelling.
Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie is also a book that is very much about urban development over multiple centuries beginning with the plight of Native Americans struggling “to preserve Cherokee landholdings against encroaching white settlers prior to and during the American Revolutionary War, to Camp Contraband and the Big Nine, multiracial solidarity during the civil rights and black power movements, and contemporary struggles over the right to the city . . .” (p. 186). The author argues that a diasporic placemaking approach to understanding the city necessitates an analysis of neighborhoods and cities as spatial projects in the sense that coalitions of actors operate to produce urban space often in the face of other coalitions with dissimilar goals and desires. That is, drawing on Doreen Massey, a diasporic placemaking approach views space as multiple, open, contested, and always in a state of becoming, yet not in a teleological sense of some preordained end, but rather—in the words of Henri Lefebvre—the city as an oeuvre, life’s work. This focus on the active construction of space and place opens up radical possibilities as geographers (in particular) have theorized, and points toward studying the politics of place and power dynamics that characterize encounters between different groups of stakeholders and their visions for the city. While the author focuses on urban development, planning practices, and the initiatives of state actors and their effects, Knapp does so through an explicitly racial lens concluding that the “history of development in Chattanooga also shows us how differentiated urban space has been, and continues to be racialized and socially stratified” (p. 186).
While Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie concludes with an examination of contemporary placemaking in the form of both the city’s efforts to engage in gentrification-based, urban renewal, it first brings the reader back to the origins of white settlers and the uprooting of the Cherokee during the nineteenth century, highlighting many themes. First, it provides the book’s initial example of how white supremacy ordered space through law (i.e., the Indian Removal Act of 1830). Second, it provides a detailed accounting of how multiracial collaborations formed between some white settlers and the Cherokee in support of Native American autonomy and independence. And, third, it provides a corrective to colonial nostalgia and amnesia that surrounds the racialized mythologies whites tell themselves about the Other. As Knapp argues, “these racialized mythologies deeply influence how non-Natives, and Chattanoogans in particular, understand and relate to some of the bloodiest and most brutal periods of their early social history” (p. 33). Carrying this method throughout the telling of Chattanooga’s evolution provides a useful deployment of geographic thought toward analyzing diasporic placemaking.
The following chapters (two through five) provide a detailed accounting of the “Rooting of a Black Diaspora in Downtown Chattanooga” (p. 34) and post-Civil War era city boosterism that sought to both claim racial harmony to foster a cosmopolitan aura with which outsiders in the Northern United States might see as a sign of a good place to invest in and migrate toward. As Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie pointedly depicts, while the achievements of blacks in Chattanooga were many—even in the face of virulent white racism—these were coopted by city elites to portray Chattanooga favorably to outsiders: “Powerful institutions like the Chamber of Commerce often appropriated black economic gains and social progress, claiming they were indicative of a sophisticated urban center ‘nearly free from racial maladjustment’” (p. 53). Yet, even under conditions not of their own choosing, blacks (alongside Jewish populations, at times) created vibrant neighborhoods, parks, and other urban spaces within and through which their lives gained meaning. As interviewee Moses Freeman offered, “It was cosmopolitan to the extent that living even—we were poor. My family was poor . . . but we never had a sense of being poor, or in poverty, or deprived” (p. 78). Knapp continues these themes of diasporic placemaking—both the hardships, yet also achievements—of working-class blacks, in particular, while acknowledging other racialized groups.
The latter chapters of the book (six, and eight through ten) focus attention on the city’s redevelopment efforts, both in the downtown as well as surrounding neighborhoods, with a focus on the Big Nine (aka, Martin Luther King neighborhood) adjacent to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), Lincoln Park, and the Southside—all neighborhoods and urban areas targeted by the city for redevelopment and revitalization. During this time, a consortium of foundations, nonprofits, and the city government formed the Community Impact Fund (CIF), which was charged with revitalizing the neighborhoods that the author covers. While not covering the same details as other treatments of this period (Fraser 2004; Fraser and Lepofsky 2004; Fraser et al. 2003; Lepofsky and Fraser 2003), Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie draws similar conclusions that Chattanooga’s rise from deindustrialization—in particular its investments in neighborhoods surrounding the downtown area—have produced a range of effects including the expansion of UTC into the Martin Luther King neighborhood, and the almost complete gentrification of the “Southside” (e.g., formally Jefferson Heights, Fort Negley and Rustville). Like earlier chapters, Knapp unearths the concealed realities (both disadvantaging and achievements) of what it has been like for particularly working-class blacks in the post-industrial, “urban core.” While space does not afford a lengthy depiction of the post-1990 efforts of the city to transform urban neighborhoods, the effects have been deeply disadvantaging to lower- to moderate-income populations of blacks and Latinx who have resided in these areas due to physical, political, and cultural displacement.
One of the strengths of Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie is that Knapp insightfully draws on the range of prior examples of cross-racialized collaboration throughout the prior chapters to illuminate current and ongoing efforts by neighborhood residents, neighborhood groups, and citywide organizing efforts to provide mutual solidarity for equitable development in the city. While no easy task, Knapp convincingly provides accounts of cross-class and race coalitions that are attempting to engage in diasporic placemaking in the face of city actors continuing to reenact urban development initiatives that have uneven discursive and material effects on those who continue to benefit from the dispossession and displacement that racialized, “working-class” populations experience in relation to the home spaces they create. While the efforts of activists, organizers, and their coalitions to promote “creative and cultural development to have transformative effects on socio-spatial development” (p. 192) may strike the reader as nascent, the power of participatory action research, storytelling, and coalition building is consistently foregrounded at the end of Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie.
Overall, Knapp provides very useful theoretical development as it pertains to human geography and planning by deploying diasporic placemaking as the theoretical scaffolding to examine the evolution of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie provides a much needed (re)orientation toward the study of cities, and it is accessible to a variety of readers (with theoretical and methodological appendices). At certain points during the treatment of more recent urban development efforts since the 1990s, Knapp might have highlighted that placemaking in Chattanooga is not simply dependent on local institutional arrangements and local state, market, and society actors. There are powerful global actors that also shape the local manifestations the book provides rich detail about. For example, the city and foundation actors (e.g., Lyndhurst Foundation, in particular) who learned about different potential pathways toward urban redevelopment were deeply influenced by national intermediaries like the Aspen Institute, Urban Land Institute, and a host of policy leaders that provided Chattanooga’s “elite” revitalizers with direction, funds, and the promise of being a cosmopolitan city. Yet, with this caveat, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie is an excellent read for anyone interested in urban development, race, and the possibilities of creating a better world.