On structures and events

ABSTRACT 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.