The changing South! An examination of residential intermixing and neighbourhood contexts in Knoxville, Tennessee

This paper examines how neighbourhood-level socio-economic, demographic, and built-environment characteristics relate to intra-urban residential intermixing, and how well the existing frameworks explain these changes. Presence of educated, white-collar professionals relate to greater intermixing whereas newer developments, higher median household income, higher housing values and/or blue-collar neighbourhoods relate to lower intermixing. While diversity in 1990 contributes to higher intermixing in 2009, over the duration of 1990 to 2009, it associates with declining intermixing. Interestingly, some communities gain in intermixing due to upwardly-mobile, educated professionals, and newly-entering foreign-born who are renting whereas some older neighbourhoods become more intermixed as professionals move into revitalized communities. The processes of changing intermixing and enclave formation re-affirm several frameworks at work, such as assimilation, resurgent ethnicity and market-led pluralism. This study suggests that even though Knoxville is a smaller metropolitan area in comparison to the largest gateways/immigrant hubs, the intra-urban dynamism of its neighbourhoods unfolds a complicated and multifaceted fabric of residential mosaics of communities developing along racial, ethnic, class, and lifecycle attributes, adding complex characteristics to its contemporary social geography.