Photo of Cumberland Park, near Broadway, taken by me in April 2018. This photo features the “Batman Building”: an AT&T office building that houses over 2,000 employees and a popular landmark.
Though I’m from the suburbs, I’ve always been drawn to Nashville’s recreational activities, vibrant community networks, and fierce undercurrent of social struggle. I’m more of an ecology student than a planning one, so I understand Nashville best as an urban ecosystem composed of “biomes” that vary in their natural histories, built terrain, and cultural constructions. Who populates these growing biomes and why? What kinds of historical, sociopolitical, and environmental forces mediate their interactions with one another? How might we understand Nashville’s cultural evolution?
Even with its urban infrastructure, Nashville is a city of rolling hills carved from a temperate Southeastern forest in the Cumberland Valley. An appreciation of this ecological significance and a sense of stewardship to sustain its future means that I grew up visiting Radnor Lake State Park, went to school next to Warner Park, and worked a summer at the Sevier Park Farmers Market. Nashville’s parks, notably the “3,000-acre Warner Parks System, the 350-acre Shelby Park, and the 1,700-acre Beaman Park” are three times larger than the national urban park average (Wadhwani) and are connected by a greenway system that served me as an avid cross country runner.
Nashville’s topography is marked by a dense center that radiates outward into increasingly sprawling zones. It is built on the Cumberland River bank: a reminder of its 19th century identity as a port city— its inseparability from the riparian environment. Downtown is home to the State Capitol, Frist Art Museum, public library, and a life-sized Parthenon replica built to acknowledge Nashville’s leadership in higher education. The focal point of downtown and a biome in itself, Broadway is a congested street of bars, music venues, sports stadiums, souvenir shops, historic attractions, and various forms of commerce. Pedestrians are a keystone species, exerting disproportionate effects on their surroundings. Their presence and a history of Bluegrass and Country street performance shape infrastructure— open air gathering spaces and a pedestrian-only bridge across the Cumberland.
Zooming out, Nashville is a network of interstates and winding back roads. Outside downtown, access to critical human-scale infrastructure like sidewalks and crosswalks is a function of wealth distribution. When I spent weekends volunteering with a mutual aid group in 2021, I watched neighborhood residents cross Dickerson Pike— a high-speed, four-lane intrastate highway— without a crosswalk. I wonder what kinds of more connected, more aided, and more dignified lives people could live if Nashville’s public transit and mobility-centric infrastructure were more accessible.
I see the rest of our city through directional divisions. I know North Nashville by the rich civil rights history of its predominantly Black inhabitants and the socioeconomic segregation that persists there, 60+ years after I-40 was built directly through Jefferson Street— a thriving Black business, HBCU, and cultural arts district (Lara & Jones). South Nashville is half melting-pot, half nuclear family suburbia. East Nashville is the land of hipsters and craft breweries. West Nashville contains the Green Hills luxury shopping district, private K-12 schools and universities like Vanderbilt, and their range of middle class to old money affiliates. Gentrification caused by local growth in the tech, finance, and corporate healthcare sectors pushes low-income residents, especially North Nashvillians, to the ever-expanding urban periphery— closer to industrial sites, farmland, and the International Airport (“Gentrification in North Nashville”).
An image of a new housing development coming up beside an older home near Downtown Nashville, reflecting a widespread trend of gentrification (“Gentrification in North Nashville”).
Behind the curtains of Music Row performances, Nashville is contested terrain. A conservative culture anchored by legacies of slavery, “Bible Belt” evangelism, and blue-collar Appalachian populism clashes with a growing torrent of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and radical organizing. Symbols of this clash are everywhere. In the same city that houses CoreCivic, the largest for-profit prison owner in the U.S., activists nonviolently occupied Legislative Plaza for 62 days as part of an anti-systemic racism movement. The annual Pride Parade passes the oldest downtown evangelical church. In 2017, bigots scattered bacon on the steps of the Nashville Islamic Center, which serves members of the largest Kurdish refugee population in the country. A paint-bloodied statue of KKK founder Nathan Bedford-Forrest, straddled magnificently on a horse and flanked by Confederate flags along I-65, was demolished in 2022 only after its owner died (Renkl).
I see the city emerging from this clash at Centennial Park’s annual Celebrate Nashville Festival, which showcases the histories, art, music, dance, clothing, and food of over 50 cultures belonging to Nashville residents. This Nashville has developed community care networks to fill basic and culturally-specific state service gaps. The TN Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Hope on the Row, Open Table, the Nashville Free Store, the Nashville Community Fridge, the Oasis Center, and too many others to count provide essential services to Nashville’s marginalized populations. To me, this is urban ecology— urban mutualism— in action.
My friend Dravina posing after performing Bharatnatyam— a South Indian classical dance— at the Celebrate Nashville showcase in 2022 (“History + Mission”).
Through its changing planned ecology, Nashville encapsulates the struggle between stasis and evolution that mirrors urban growth across the Southern U.S.. Nashville is the new Southern city— maybe not a hallmark of “Southern Urbanism” as we understand it in this class, but its own kind.
Works Cited
Lara, P. J., & Jones, I. (2020, November 16). Housing segregation in Nashville. ArcGIS StoryMaps. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/050e09fabed0474b9687525fbc4e4c9a
Gentrification in North Nashville. The Tennessee Tribune. (2021, November 14). Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://tntribune.com/gentrification-in-north-nashville/
History + mission. Celebrate Nashville Cultural Festival. (2020, October 1). Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://celebratenashville.org/history-mission/
Renkl, M. (2022, January 17). America's ugliest Confederate statue is gone. racism isn't. The New York Times. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/opinion/confederate-monuments-tennessee-nathan-forrest.html#:~:text=The%20malformed%20Confederate%20figure%20seated%20atop%20a%20malformed,the%20eyesore%20was%20a%20frequent%20target%20of%20vandalism.
Wadhwani, A. (2019, May 24). In Nashville, it can be hard to find a park close to home. city officials are working to change that. The Tennessean. Retrieved February 21, 2023, from https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/05/24/nashville-lags-behind-nations-top-cities-access-parks/3768469002/
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