Map of Tennessee Valley Region and TVA dams

Department of Geography, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA e-mail aldeimand ecu.edu 

Brunn (td.), Engineering Earth, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4 105, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 

The maintenance of Jim Crow did not occur simply through the reproduction of certain ideas about the supposed inferiority of African Americans. It also required the construction of landscapes and other spatial expressions of control that reinforced white supremacy and maintained the wide chasm between the races (Inwood, 2004 O Brien, 2007). As Powell (2007 49) observes, The arrangement of space has been one of the most important ways to distribute and retard opportunity along racial lines. Indeed, the TVA played an active role in perpetuating Jim Crow by building racially segregated worksites, parks, and entire settlements. Of particular 

Megaprojects are often defined and studied in the context of the social and environmental changes they induce. Indeed, Gellert and Lynch (2003 15) identify megaprojects as those that transform landscapes rapidly, intentionally, and profoundly in very visible ways, and require coordination of capital and state power. As they also suggest, displacements or stresses are inherent within megaproject development. These stresses result not only from altering the physical landscape. 

As we allude to above, there were complementary and competing views at work in the early days of the New Deal. The idea most clearly associated with social justice and social engineering proved to be the shortest lived of all the TVA endeavors. There were two main themes at the root of this idealistic impulse. First, Franklin 

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