historian Frederick Jackson Turner published "The Importance of Frontiers in American History" (1958 edition) in 1893. This exemplary paper, he proposed:
the development of the United States shows It is not just a single line of advancement, but a return to the original condition in the constantly advancing frontier zone, and new development in that area. In this way, the development of American society continues on the frontier... In this process, the frontier is the frontier of the immigration wave, the meeting point of barbarism and civilization... The wilderness is infiltrated by more and more lines of civilization. . In Turner's view, the purpose of opening up frontiers and suppressing wilderness and barbarism is to open up habitable spaces in the uncooperative and uncooperative nature. This is not just a mere expansion of space and the gradual domestication of the physical world. The development of the frontier can certainly achieve these goals, but for Turner, it is also the core experience that defines the uniqueness of the American national character. As the strong pioneers pushed the frontier outward each time, not only new lands were incorporated into the American territory, but new blood was also injected into the blood of American ideals. Each wave of westward travel, while conquering nature, also transmits the shock wave of human nature back to the east.
By the end of the 20th century, the imagery of wilderness and frontiers was no longer applicable to the plains, mountains, and forests of the west (the degree of civilization in the west was already considerable), but more applicable to cities in the eastern United States. With the rise of urban suburbanization after World War II, American cities began to be regarded as "urban wilderness"; cities used to be-and most still are-breed disease and chaos, crime and corruption, drugs and danger Hotbed. In fact, these worries were expressed by urban theorists who paid attention to the "deterioration" and "decline" of cities, the "social ills" of inner cities, and the "pathological phenomena" of urban society as early as the 1950s and 1960s. In short, "the city is no longer a paradise". The city is portrayed as a wilderness, or a worse description-"jungle". Compared with the portrayal in the news media or social science writings, this is more vivid in Hollywood's "urban jungle" genre movies, such as "King Kong", "West Side Story", "Dreaming Warriors" and "Bronx's Apache Fortress" the theme of these movies. As Robert Bolegarde (1993) said, this "discourse about decline" dominates discussions about cities.
Anti-urbanism has become a core theme of American culture. Similar to the original wilderness experience, in the past 30 years, people's impressions of the city have also experienced a shift from fear to romanticism, and the development of urban imagery from wilderness to cutting-edge. In the 17th century, Cotton Mather and the Puritans in New England were full of fear of forests and regarded them as impenetrable evil, dangerous wilderness, and primitive places. But as the forest continues to be domesticated, and it is constantly changing in the hands of increasingly capitalized human laborers, Turner's milder frontier imagery gradually replaced Mather's evil forest theory. This kind of optimism and expansive expectations is associated with the "frontier" that reflects confidence and conquest. Therefore, in the American cities of the 20th century, the image of urban wilderness—meaning the desperate abandonment—had begun to be replaced by the image of the frontier of the city by the 1960s (despite riots everywhere). This transformation can be partly traced back to the discussion of "urban renewal", but in the 1970s and 1980s, as single-family houses and apartment blocks gradually formed, the symbolic meaning of the successor of "urban renewal" was strengthened. In the language of gentrifcation, the preference for frontier imagery is obvious: urban pioneers, urban homesteaders and urban cowboys have become the new folk heroes of the urban frontier. In the 1980s, real estate magazines even talked about "urban scouts," whose job is to inspect the surrounding areas of high-end neighborhoods, to check whether the plots are suitable for investment, and to report on the friendliness of local residents. The less optimistic commentators accused the newly emerging “urban heroes” of being connected to the drug culture in the inner city.
Just as Turner recognizes the existence of Native Americans, but regards them as part of the wild wilderness, contemporary urban frontier imagery also regards the current inner city population as natural elements of his surrounding environment. Therefore, the term "urban pioneer" is as arrogant as the original concept of "pioneer" because it implies a city that has not yet been socialized; like Native Americans, the urban working class is not considered social Part of the natural environment. Turner in thisThe point is very clear. He referred to the frontier as "the meeting point of barbarism and civilization." Although the frontiers of gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s were rarely stated so clearly, the way they treated the inner city population was roughly the same. There are many similarities between
. For Turner, the westward advancement of the geographic boundary is related to forging the "national spirit." The same spiritual expectation is also expressed in the voice of support for gentrification as the frontier of urban regeneration; in the most extreme cases, new urban pioneers are expected to be able to treat the languishing like their predecessors. The national spirit makes a contribution: Leading the country into a new world, leaving the problems of the old world behind. To borrow from a federal document, the historical mission of gentrification involves "psychologically re-experiencing past successes, because disappointing events have been unfolding in recent years, such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, energy crisis, environmental pollution, Inflation, high interest rates, etc." (Historical Heritage Protection Advisory Committee, 1980). From here, we will see that it is only a short journey from the failed liberalism to the restoration of the Landless City in the 1990s. No one really thinks yet that we should treat James Routh (who was responsible for the development of the unique downtown tourist shopping streets such as the Baltimore Inner Harbor, the South Street Seaport in New York, and the Faneuil Hall in Boston) as a gentry Modernized John Wayne, but as long as these projects become the standard for the gentrification transformation of many urban centers, this statement will still be quite consistent with the urban frontier discourse. Finally, the important conclusion is that, whether in the west in the 18th and 19th centuries, or in the inner city at the end of the 20th century, frontier discourse rationalized and legitimized the process of conquest.
Turner's influence on the study of western history is still huge, and the Patriot history standards he set up are hard to ignore. However, a new generation of "revisionist" historians has begun to rewrite the history of the frontier. Patricia Nielsen Limerick, in her disorganization of Western Hollywood history, perceives the reappropriation of cutting-edge motifs by modern cities:
If Hollywood wants to capture the true emotions of Western history, its movies will be About real estate. John Wayne will be neither a gunman nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, a speculator, or a lawyer who filed a claim. The duel will appear in the land office or court; the weapons are contracts and litigation, not revolvers.
John Wayne
Now, in many ways, this seems to be a highly nationalistic expression of the gentrification process. In fact, gentrification is a completely international phenomenon, widely occurring in cities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, as well as in some cities in Japan, South Africa, and Brazil. In Prague or Sydney, or Toronto, the language of the frontier does not automatically become the ideological lubricant of gentrification like in the United States, and this frontier myth applicable to cities at the end of the century seems to be an American creation. There is no doubt that although the frontier mythology is more clearly manifested in the United States, the initial frontier experience is not a purely American commodity. First, it is the imagination of the new world of potential immigrants from Scandinavia or Sicily, and this imagination is as real as the experience of the new world of German or Chinese immigrants already living in Kansas City or San Francisco. Secondly, other European colonial outposts, such as Australia or the inland of Kenya, the "Northwest Frontier" of Canada, or India and Pakistan, although the class composition, ethnic structure, and topography are completely different, they enjoy the same effective frontier panacea. Keep them the same ideology. Finally, the frontier motif, anyway, appears in non-US situations.
translation: Li Yeguo
