Borderlands as Urban Space Contexts for Twenty-First-Century Chinese Cities Piper Gaubatz
At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, mounted the podium and addressed the American Historical Association. His words, spoken in a hall in what was to become the Art Institute of Chicago, began an academic and popular conversation that continues to this day about the role of frontiers and borderlands in shaping history and national identities, cultures, and institutions. He began by quoting from the census superintendent’s report on the 1890 survey: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” The remainder of the talk presented his theory: that the experience of the frontier had shaped American identity. He concluded: “Now . . . the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”1 The “isolated bodies of settlement” referenced in the census report were cities. As Turner observed, “These trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City.”2 The development of cities marked the end of the frontier; cities, by definition, had no place in a frontier region. Among the many subsequent critics of Turner’s agrarian frontier hypothesis was Richard Clement Wade, who brought frontier cities into the discussion of both frontier history and urban studies.3 Nonetheless, it was only in the late twentieth century, as borders and border cities have
become increasingly central players in the rapidly shifting global economy, that they have come to the forefront of urban studies, and that concepts of frontiers and borders have been applied to the analysis of cities and urban life more generally. As Saskia Sassen contends, “Cities are one of the key sites where new norms and new identities are made” and thus constitute a new frontier zone.4 The century-spanning conversation about frontiers, borderlands, and the role of cities within them provides a context for Sassen and others to consider borderlands as urban space and cities as frontier zones. While “frontier cities” were once considered peripheral, “border cities” play an increasingly central role in the globalizing world, with the Chinese developmental cities at the core of contemporary globalization. The changing nature of borderlands and the conditions of borderland space have a strong impact on the development of cities on the Chinese frontiers, and the possibilities for developmental border cities in contemporary China. Borderlands The concept of “frontier” evokes ungoverned or less-governed territories of interaction between large political, cultural, or economic regimes. The Roman limes, for example, were more conceptual and transient outer zones of the empire than they were specific or fixed territorial limits.5 Although frontiers were a key unit of analysis during much of the twentieth century, the end of the century saw a discursive shift from frontiers to borders as scholars turned toward the increasingly fluid configurations of formal border regions and