Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp (review)

Nestled in the shadow of Lookout Mountain around a bend in the Tennessee River, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee has experienced tremendous turnover in demographics, land use, and politics in its almost 200-year history. Christened “The Dynamo of Dixie,” Chattanooga has held an important, but often ignored, role in the economic life of the American South. Simultaneously, the city also maintains an historical reputation of racial harmony and cooperation, being described in promotional documents as “the least southern of the South’s great cities” (p.47) and “nearly free from racial maladjustment” (p.53). However, in her book Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Courtney Elizabeth Knapp investigates and refutes these claims of racial unity by exploring the development of Chattanooga from a Cherokee village to the fourth-largest city in Tennessee.

Heavily influenced by epistemologies of Black Geographies, championed by scholars such as Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Knapp argues that despite being removed from their homelands, diasporic populations are still able to create spaces of belonging and security, oftentimes in hostile locations. Like Black Geographies, the author’s multidiasporic placemaking, defined as the “socio-spatial practices through which migratory and uprooted people plant new cultural and material roots” (p.12), recognizes the dialectic relationship with place that marginalized populations experience. Specifically, Knapp explores this relationship through the field of urban planning, contending that scholars “must be willing to confront and critically deconstruct the urban progress narratives” in communities that “we know, plan in, and inhabit” to better enable the work of multidiasporic placemaking (p.13). Using a case study of Chattanooga, chosen because of its complex racial history to illustrate her method of critical deconstruction, the author demonstrates “how competing cosmopolitan narratives and spatial structures have been central to both mainstream planning and development agendas and diasporic communities’ efforts to demand a more just and equitable city” (p.13).

The foundation of the above framework is laid out in the introduction to Knapp’s work, interwoven with a brief discussion of the demographic and cultural changes that Chattanooga has experienced over the last 200 years. The proceeding nine chapters can broadly be divided into two parts: Chapters One through Five, which explore the history of varied diasporic populations that called the area around Chattanooga home, and Chapters Six through Nine, which describe the actions taken by diasporic populations to reclaim spaces and practice urban planning within the city. Reading through both sections reveals the effort Knapp put into producing her work, pouring through historical newspaper articles, planning documents, and government reports to deconstruct the racial narratives Chattanooga was built on, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted through a year’s worth of community and civic events. The latter methods led the author to develop two action research-oriented community planning initiatives that supported bottom-up organizing in the city’s diasporic neighborhoods.

The book’s first half begins with the story of the land’s indigenous inhabitants, focusing on the Cherokee and their interactions with white settlers, which culminated with the infamous forced departure of American Indians on the Trail of Tears. This first chapter also introduces one of the book’s main themes, racial paternalism, as American Indians, and later, African Americans, “were not understood to be people possessing a priori humanity. Rather, they were…social experiments with the potential to develop humanity – assuming proper indoctrination” by white settlers (p.22). As such, missions, including Chattanooga’s Brainerd, were established to undermine indigenous culture and sovereignty, instilling an atmosphere of white supremacy that has pervaded the city since. The following four chapters turn the reader’s attention to the history of Black life in Chattanooga, from the introduction of slavery to Reconstruction and the eventual implementation of oppressive Jim Crow laws...