East Nashville skyline

Abstract

This article examines a familiar urban dynamic — gentrification — in the less familiar setting of Nashville, Tennessee. In recent years, gentrification processes are accompanied by legitimating appeals to civic design trends and new cultural dynamics, particularly those associated with the New Urbanism and the promotion of ‘‘creative’’ city environments nurturing educated and culturally savvy residents. These discourses have increasingly come to define contemporary ‘‘progressive’’ urban policy, promoting values of diversity and cosmopolitanism while eliding standard concerns over displacement and the retrenchment of state services. Beginning with a dramatic street-level encounter between old and new styles of urban development, this account addresses the juxtaposition of a low density district targeted for redevelopment on Nashville’s East Side with the obdurate presence of neighboring public housing projects, inscribing competing political and cultural imaginaries in the built environment. It contributes a detailed examination of the encounter between ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ policy agendas with the spatial and historical specificity of a mid-South city, using thick description to unpack the sedimentary processes of transformation, and the contributions of state and non-state actors to new identity formation. This on-the-ground exploration further allows for a critical assessment of the progressive virtues of diversity and cosmopolitanism as they are manifest in the context of neoliberal state action and spatial restructuring.