On structures and events

Patrick Wolfe's description of settler-colonialism as a "structure, not an event" has made a lasting impact on the field of settler-colonial studies and beyond. This short intervention considers what the metaphors of "structure" and "event" reveal and what they conceal when they are deployed in the service of understanding settler-colonial urbanism. It emphasizes the point that settler-colonial cities are multi-scalar entities produced by an intersecting range of forces and asks whether an over-reliance on Wolfe's most famous phrase might sometimes relieve analysts of the burden of accounting for the complexity of these entanglements.