ABSTRACT
Most well-developed theories of urban inequality draw on macro-level economics to explain neighbourhood-level change. Structuralists argue that neighbourhoods – whether poor, middle class or wealthy, or racially homogenous, segregated or integrated – do not spontaneously take shape. Rather, they are constructed through processes of uneven development, wherein some places are systematically less developed, enabling other places to become increasingly valued and valuable. In North America, the uneven development of land and accumulation by dispossession can be traced to colonization, as settlers manufactured racially 'pure' spaces through extermination and forced removal of indigenous people. Structural theorists posit that the present deepening of neighbourhood inequality was exacerbated by the turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s. East Nashville has been made and re-made over time, a once-vibrant neighbourhood, marginalized by intentional disinvestment, and now revitalized and reconstituted as a location for wealth production.
