Naturalizing the Empire: Urban Nature and Spatial Politics in the Post-Frontier American Landscape

Introduction: Reconfiguring the Empire in the Post-Frontier Era

In the summer of 1893, as the United States confronted both a cultural crisis marked by the vanishing frontier and an economic downturn precipitated by industrial expansion, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, where, on July 12, before an audience of over 200 historians, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered what would become one of the most influential addresses in American historiography: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The moment has since been hailed as a turning point, both in the narrative of the nation and in the conceptualization of its historical development. Turner asserted that he and his listeners were witnessing the closing of the first and formative phase of American history, which was defined by the advance of the agrarian frontier and the democratic vitality it had supposedly engendered. With the disappearance of the vast, free land once known as “the frontier,” Turner declared that the epoch had come to an end in 1890. ¹ The frontier’s essential feature, he argued, was its location at “the hither edge of free land,” where contact with wilderness forged the national character (Turner, 1994, p. 32). The disappearance of the frontier posed not just a geographic reality, but a symbolic vacuum, one that compelled his contemporaries to reimagine the coordinates of national identity.

This call to locate a “new frontier”—one capable of reconciling the ideals of expansion, vitality, and civilization with the evolving realities of industrial modernity—quickly shaped both political rhetoric and cultural production. Theodore Roosevelt, upon receiving a copy of Turner’s paper, praised it for having “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely” (as cited in Morison, 1894, p. 191). Roosevelt, for his part, had already advanced a frontier thesis in The Winning of the West, where he, like Turner, articulated a latent consensus: that national renewal required a new spatial imagination. Turner’s address sharpened this diagnosis: the developmental impasse confronting the United States arose from the disappearance of the old frontier and the failure to articulate a new one. The question of how to transform the nation’s old, domestic, agrarian frontier into a new frontier of world power and industrial development has become a defining concern of American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s (Slotkin, 1992, p. 20).

Yet what followed was not simply a new wave of expansionist discourse. Rather, it was a reorganization of symbolic geography. While the frontier had long operated as the privileged space through which American exceptionalism was imagined, its disappearance called for a spatial and conceptual reconfiguration. Amid the canonical retellings of Turner’s thesis and its geopolitical reverberations, a parallel but less examined narrative unfolded: the relocation of frontier rhetoric into the urban landscape. As the American imagination resituated itself in the face of territorial finitude, “urban nature” emerged as a new symbolic frontier. By definition, urban nature consists of “air, the materials suspended within it, and the light and heat transmitted through it,” and, as landscape architects have noted, it is “more than a collection of individual features like wind, hills, rivers, and trees,” but rather “the consequence of a complex interaction between the multiple purposes and activities of human beings and the natural processes” (Spirn, 1985, p. 39). Urban nature, understood here not only as a cultural and spatial metaphor but also as an emerging field of cultural studies that engages with ecological processes, novel ecosystems, and the dynamics of human–nature relations, offers a critical lens for examining the intersections of nature and imperial power. Articulated above all by intellectual and political elites through their writings and planning practices in the post-frontier era, urban nature was framed as a spatial and mythical site onto which the politics of national regeneration could be projected.

Since Columbus’s encounter with the New World, the American land has been the site of an enduring fascination with nature—a mode of thinking that persistently linked the power and character of the American people to their proximity to the natural world. This sensibility gave rise to a series of interwoven narratives—agrarian myth, pastoral ideal, garden myth—that came to define the politics of American natural experience (Miller, 1956, p. 204). And yet, these mythic narratives have often been read as antithetical to urbanism, as though they emerged only in resistance to the city. Nevertheless, this essay argues that, ever since the earliest colonial imaginations of the New World, the idea of a “garden city” has figured as a spatial metaphor through the territorial expansion and nation-building narratives of the United States. This notion later developed into an American adaptation of the Garden City movement, which originated in England in 1898, highlighting both a continuity and a dialogue between the Old World and the New. From the prophetic vision of a “New Jerusalem” in seventeenth-century European discourse of the New World, to John Winthrop’s emblematic “City upon a Hill” sermon aboard the Arbella, ² and onward into the secularization of city planning and social reform, ³ such narratives, circulated largely within the sermons, planning schemes, and reform discourses of literate elites, have continuously placed urban nature at the heart of American destiny. The evolution of the garden city ideal thus marks a persistent recalibration of nature within the built environment and an ongoing revaluation of human–nature relations—processes that became foundational to the American mind and its cultural construction.

As Henry Nash Smith (1999) observed, American cultural imagination has long been shaped by two interwoven mythologies: the “myth of the empire,” grounded in expansion and conquest, and the “myth of the garden,” which envisioned nature as a moral refuge and ecological sanctuary. These myths are not contradictory, but mutually generative, and in the post-frontier era, their convergence found a renewed expression in the political language of urban nature. The notion of myth, as Roland Barthes (1991) contends, does not simply conceal or deny ideologies, but naturalizes them: “it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, [and] it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact” (p. 143). Spatial politics embodied in myths reconciles history and politics, enabling contemporary regimes to recast myth as a vehicle for legitimizing structures of power (Suleman & Qayum, 2017, pp. 18–19).

In the post-frontier imagination, urban nature became a key ideological and spatial instrument in naturalizing imperial power. By following the frontier rhetoric from the prairie to the parks, from wilderness to built space, from domestic to transnational colonies, this essay examines the spatial politics of how urban nature, emerging in the wake of the frontier’s closure, became the cultural terrain upon which American empire was naturalized. Architectural and landscape forms, like literature and painting, can be read as cultural texts that articulate social, political, and environmental ideas. Although such readings may risk emphasizing symbolism, they remain a productive approach to understanding architecture not only as the object of “discourses on architecture” but also as a site of “discourses in architecture” (Hirst, 1993, p. 52), where narratives of nature and empire were inscribed in the post-frontier era.

Nature’s Nation: The Spatial Construction of American Identity

From its inception, the American nation has historically grounded its identity not in shared ancestry or language, as was common in Europe, but in a symbolic and material relationship with nature (Grusin, 2004, p. 1). The formulation of the United States as “nature’s nation” (Miller, 1956, p. 207), frequently invoked in both political rhetoric and cultural production, did not simply reflect a geographical fact; rather, it articulated a foundational ideologeme that fused ecological landscape with national destiny. The etymological kinship between “nature” and “nation,” both derived from the Latin root “natura,” meaning to be born or to generate, reflects this conceptual entanglement. Throughout American history, nature has been recruited to define the nation—and, reciprocally, the nation has imagined itself as guardian and curator of a unique natural inheritance. From the earliest colonial encounters, including Columbus’s vision of a rediscovered Eden, through the romanticization of the “noble savage,” and into the frontier narratives that shaped the republic’s collective memory, American culture consistently rested upon a perceived intimacy with nature.

As the United States transitioned from an agrarian republic to an industrial empire, the search for a distinct cultural identity intensified. Roderick Nash (1969) observed that Americans, severed from Europe but anxious about their cultural legitimacy, turned to nature as the repository of national character: “Almost desperately, Americans sought sustenance for their national ego... Gradually cultural nationalists began to sense that in one respect their country was different: nature in the New World had no counterpart in the Old” (p. 66). The New World’s wild nature, so often contrasted with the refinement of Europe, served as a compensatory narrative for a young nation seeking cultural legitimacy in the shadow of Europe. Nature, in this context, was no longer an external terrain—it became internalized as a symbolic resource capable of transforming “embarrassed provincials into proud and confident citizens” (Nash, 1969, p. 66).

In the American cultural imagination, this symbolic inclination was materialized through both textual and visual forms. As early as 1820, publishers planned albums such as Picturesque Views of the American Scene, seeking to frame the nation’s natural landscapes—its “lofty mountains,” “unexampled magnitude of our cataracts,” and “wild grandeur of our western forests”—as surpassing any scenery found in Europe (as cited in Nash, 1969, p. 67). Similarly, John James Audubon, when traveling in Europe, described its excess of refinement as a marvel, while he affirmed his fidelity to the beloved American land with its boundless freedom (as cited in Rhodes, 2004, p. 297). These narratives did not merely celebrate the American natural scenery; they staged nature as a marker of civilization, mapping national identity onto ecological vastness.

Yet this symbolic fusion was not static. In the late nineteenth century, as the material frontier closed and imperial expansion accelerated, the spatial logic of national identity shifted. What had once been imagined as an open wilderness became a terrain to be preserved, aestheticized, and—crucially—urbanized. Historians and public intellectuals increasingly turned to the natural landscape to build a new imperial identity. The American West, for instance, previously the site of frontier conquest, was rearticulated as the ecological source of American character. In The Central Gold Region (1860), William Gilpin advanced a teleological narrative of empires inscribed onto the natural landscape. He identified an “isothermal zodiac, or belt of equal warmth,” encircling the globe between 25 and 55 degrees north latitude, as the destined path of civilizational progress, along which, he argued, history had witnessed the rise of all the major empires: Chinese, Indian, Persian, Grecian, Roman, Spanish, British, and, culminating in his vision, the United States.

This ideological logic found one of its earliest and most emblematic visual expressions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The crisis of the vanishing frontier, compounded by economic depression and social unrest at the time, necessitated a new spatial imagination. The 1880s alone witnessed nearly ten thousand strikes and work stoppages nationwide, a staggering figure that underscored the growing chasm between labor and capital (Boyer, 1983, p. 12). As Alan Trachtenberg (1982) notes, by the end of 1893, the national economy had collapsed into what many perceived as a class war. In this context, the Fair emerged not merely as a spectacle of imperial progress but as a compensatory performance that sought to stabilize American identity in a moment of rupture. It is noteworthy that the official title of the 1893 exposition marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, both a celebration of the so-called “New World” and a symbolic dissociation from the Old. It articulated, through landscape and architecture, a cultural imagination in which the process of “de-Europeanization” had become central to the American sense of identity. That this exhibition of national distinctiveness took place at the very moment when the frontier—long mythologized as the crucible of American identity—was declared vanished is telling. To borrow Bruno Latour’s terms, it is only when habitual structures are disrupted that the cultural systems undergirding them are truly perceived.

The Garden in the Machine: Urban Nature and the Architectural Myth

Since the success of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, world’s fairs have become integral to the globalizing imagination, spreading across urban centers from St. Petersburg to Hanoi. In the United States, following the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the institution of the exposition gained momentum precisely when industrial growth stalled and social unrest surged. By the 1890s, such events no longer merely celebrated progress; they managed anxiety by framing decline as transition, stagnation as evolution. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, this tension was especially acute. Under these layered conditions, the fair offered a carefully curated space through which the United States could reassert its exceptionalism, now increasingly inflected by imperial ambition and environmental nostalgia. Expositions helped the United States articulate a mode of imperial governance that sought to manage the world through the logic of imperialism. ⁴ The Chicago exposition, in its very essence, was an effort to “formulate the Modern” (Goode, 1895, pp. 8–9), offering millions of visitors an opportunity to reaffirm their collective national identity through an updated synthesis of technological advancement and civilization spectacle. ⁵

Intriguingly, at the center of this spatial narrative stood not a machine of modern industry, but a cross-section of a sequoia—23 feet wide, over 2,000 years old, transported by ten railcars from California’s General Grant Park. Placed in the rotunda of the Government Building, where the “Civilization and Progress” exposition was on full display, the redwood segment became one of the most visited exhibits. Originally 300 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old, the sequoia was introduced by the official guidebook as “the largest section of redwood ever moved” (Craig, 1978, p. 212). Ascending the spiral staircase embedded within the hollowed trunk, visitors encountered a photo chronicle of its felling and transport. At the top of the staircase, visitors emerged onto a panoramic platform, overlooking the cruciform geometry of the building, with each axis radiating toward one of the four halls dedicated to the achievements of the New World technological civilization. Nature, often imagined as the antithesis of human civilization, was positioned at the core of the architecture.

This was not incidental. In the symbolic economy of the exposition, the sequoia staged an updated allegory of national time. Its rings, arranged vertically, offered a vision of temporal depth that extended beyond human generations and national histories. Its immensity dwarfed all human artifacts. Yet the tree’s relocation also revealed a paradox: what was celebrated as permanence had in fact been uprooted, felled, and transported across the continent. In this sense, its very displacement dramatized how imperial authority naturalized itself by appropriating and re-siting nature. Within late nineteenth-century nationalist rhetoric, however, the giant sequoia was still described as “a fitting natural emblem of the powerful and beneficent republic that has also grown up on American soil” (The Columbian Gallery, 1894, p.103), masking the violence of removal beneath a veneer of natural continuity. As Julie Brown (1994) aptly observes, this particular specimen was “perhaps the perfect exhibition artifact: authentic, imposing, and without replication.” If, as Leo Marx has famously argued, the encroachment of industrial machinery into the pastoral symbolized the “Machine in the Garden,” then at the turn of the century, the Garden in the Machine was emerging as a new trend. Inverting Leo Marx’s classic formulation, the fair installed nature not as a pastoral retreat, but as an infrastructural principle. The garden was no longer what modernity displaced. It was how modernity imagined itself.

What the redwood rendered in monumental form, the fair’s urban plan amplified in spatial allegory. The core area of the exposition, named the White City, was arranged in a symmetrical grid overlooking Lake Michigan and simultaneously evoking a grandeur of neoclassical civilization—colonnades, domes, axial boulevards, monumental fountains. ⁶ Nonetheless, it was not the built architecture alone that defined the fair’s ideological signature. Rather, it was what they framed. At the very heart of the White City lay the Wooded Island, a 16-acre naturalistic park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Irregular, vegetated, and deliberately undomesticated, the island formed the central terrain around which the City’s symmetry revolved. In this inversion of spatial hierarchy, nature no longer lingered at the city’s margins. Instead, it assumed the role of generative power, the sacred core from which imperial order emanated.

A devotee of transcendentalism, Olmsted (1893) had attended multiple lectures by Emerson and, at age 22, actively encouraged friends in Hartford to read Nature: Addresses and Lectures. His own commentary on the Wooded Island reveals the ideological stakes of this design. The island, he wrote, was meant to resemble “a natural bayou. . . not suggestive of stagnancy or any form of foulness, or unhealthfulness,” but rather a secluded zone of aesthetic vitality. The contrast was intentional. Where the White City’s architecture mimicked European imperial characteristics, the island’s wilderness stood as an index of American originality: the former aligned the United States with classical heritage, while the latter differentiated it from the Old World. This reconciliation allowed the exposition to perform a sleight of hand: to project an American modernity that was both neoclassical and post-frontier, industrial and ecological, universalist and exceptional. As Daniel Burnham (1893), the chief planner of the World’s Columbian Exposition, would later admit, the island lagoons and park system designed by Olmsted stood out as “the only original design” in the entire fair. The rest—grand plazas, axial boulevards, domed pavilions—replicated the design perfected by the Paris Exposition: symmetry, spectacle, and a monumental fountain as centerpiece. In this visual display, architectural grandeur spoke with a European accent. And yet, it was not the imported marble but the meandering lagoon, not the colonnaded halls but the untamed Wooded Island, that was tasked with bearing the weight of national character. As the mythic frontier was declared closed, it was this irregular, green, and deliberately unpaved urban nature that became the new signifier of American exceptionalism—raw enough to evoke wilderness, curated enough to serve as empire’s stage. In this sense, the Garden in the Machine, repurposed and reframed, became the stage upon which empire was not only represented, but naturalized. The exposition did not simply reverse a metaphor. It rendered a new political ontology—one in which urban nature became the infrastructure of empire, and the empire itself, in turn, was recoded as an ecological stewardship.

Among the neoclassical pavilions and monumental fountains of the White City, one structure on the Wooded Island stood out in both scale and symbolism: the Hunter’s Cabin. It was designed under the patronage of the Boone and Crockett Club, which was founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge in New York and was widely regarded as a vanguard organization in the cultural promotion of frontier wilderness. With its membership capped at fewer than one hundred carefully selected men, the Club’s roster by 1893 already read like a political and cultural Who’s Who. The cabin at first appeared to celebrate the rustic virtues of pioneer life. Its log-built exterior and frontier décor, adorned with moose antlers, wagon wheels, and hunting implements, conjured a vision of self-made manhood, rugged terrain, and republican simplicity. Yet in this convergence of elite sport, environmental symbolism, and architectural performance, the cabin functioned less as a simple homage to pioneer life than as a rustic façade through which frontier nostalgia was mobilized to consolidate imperial authority.

This performance of rugged individualism was anything but spontaneous. It was, in fact, a highly coded ritual—a gentleman’s reenactment of primitive life, staged in the heart of an industrial metropolis. In this context, the rhetorical deployment of nature in urban space was not confined to the literature or landscape painting; it was materially instantiated in built form. This performance also relied on an ideology of primitivism, in which elite men appropriated the signs of rough pioneer existence as cultural capital, while rendering Indigenous presence either invisible or relegated to the past. The Hunter’s Cabin, instead of functioning as a silent backdrop, acted as a discursive structure: a medium through which social imagination, environmental ideologies, and political values were spatially rehearsed.

In this spatial configuration, the Hunter’s Cabin assumed a triadic narrative function. First, it served as a mythic primer on American origins, dramatizing the pioneer’s transformation of the wilderness into order (Roosevelt and Grinnell, 1893, p. 334). Constructed of raw timber, furnished with emblems of the hunt, and stripped of industrial finishes, the structure evoked the myth of the “primitive hut” as theorized in the Enlightenment cultural discourse: the archetypal threshold where nature yields to civilization. ⁷ Yet the cabin’s staging of wilderness reproduced a frontierist ideology that celebrated the conquest of nature while effacing the violence of Indigenous dispossession. In this sense, the cabin did not simply memorialize pioneer virtue; it reinscribed settler colonial conquest as a timeless national ethos. Second, the cabin operated as a legible architectural text, ideologically constructed to persuade the public of nature’s moral necessity. For Roosevelt (1893), in particular, wilderness was not merely ecological—it was ethical, a terrain of self-discipline, masculinity, and national virtue. This logic mirrored Turner’s frontier thesis, in which contact with wilderness served as the crucible of the American character (Nash, 1976). Finally, the cabin intervened in a broader debate about architectural nationalism. Thinkers such as John Ruskin and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc had long championed vernacular forms, such as English cottages and Swiss chalets, as cultural inscriptions of landscape-rooted identity. ⁸ The American Hunter’s Cabin entered this lineage, reconfiguring frontier architecture as the stylistic embodiment of the American mind.

Though The Cosmopolitan Magazine assured readers that the Chicago fair was “not for the few at the top or for the helpless lot in the gutter, but for the Average” (Besant, 1893, pp. 536–537), the Hunter’s Cabin belied this fiction of democratic accessibility. Even by the hierarchical standards of contemporary gentlemen’s clubs, the Boone and Crockett Club stood out as an exceptionally exclusive male association. The cabin thus became a ritualized stage on which Roosevelt and his peers reenacted frontier intimacy, transforming wilderness experience into elite performance. Sculptor Edward Kemeys later recalled that during Roosevelt’s visit to the fair, the cabin served as his favorite retreat, where “the three old mountaineer friends (Kemeys, Roosevelt, and Hofer) sat day after day and recounted pioneer experiences.” ⁹ These episodes of masculine remembrance were more than nostalgic sentiments; they appropriated the spatial politics of the wilderness as cultural capital. They materialized the symbolic economy of the exposition, where access to natural resources was reimagined as a privilege of certain classes: what appeared as an experience supposedly open to the average citizen was in fact restricted to the selected few. The Fair’s architectural and landscape forms articulated an elite vision of nature and empire, even as they were staged for mass spectatorship.

Such cultural labor of naturalizing the frontier was not confined to architectural design. It extended into cultural narratives, where literature and visual culture converged to articulate a national imagination centered on individualism, conquest, and masculine virtue. The frontier myth, first fashioned through the legendary adventures of Daniel Boone and refined in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, reached its emblematic height in the romanticized heroism of Francis Parkman and Frederic Remington. These figures, alternately rendered in prose and pigment, helped crystallize a symbolic regime in which the wilderness was not a collective commons, but a stage reserved for the exceptional—those deemed physiologically, racially, or spiritually fit to inhabit its rigors. Yet these narratives did more than celebrate adventure and masculine resolve; they translated the violence of settler colonial expansion into myth, portraying Indigenous dispossession as a natural and inevitable precondition for national growth. In Remington’s grand tableaux, the American West unfolds as a theater of noble savagery and hardened resolve, where Native Americans and cowboys, while coded as vanishing, are granted dignity only insofar as they dramatize the frontier’s final conquest. Owen Wister’s The Virginian refigures this logic into a social character: the gentleman frontiersman, cultivated yet elemental, drawn to the edge not to escape civilization but to complete it. Here, frontier violence is reimagined as moral pedagogy, legitimizing conquest by recasting it as cultural refinement. And like Roosevelt’s curation of the Hunter’s Cabin, these fictions stage wilderness not as alterity, but as inheritance—a selective origin myth that naturalized settler colonial conquest and authorized the emergence of a new ruling class of the modern empire.

Cultural and literary narrative rituals also mirror the ideological function of the cabin itself by performing class legitimacy through rehearsed intimacy with nature. To invoke Boone or Crockett was not merely to summon a historical heritage, but to reassert a social claim—an imagined continuity between pioneer authenticity and elite entitlement. The violence at the heart of this symbolic order was constitutive. The cabin’s symbolism erased the settler colonial violence that had historically underpinned frontier life, recasting conquest as cultural heritage and legitimizing its translation into urban and imperial forms. Beneath the pastoral veneer, a socially Darwinist aesthetic governed this vision of democracy in the young empire: one in which merit was measured through proximity to risk, and virtue confirmed by mastery over land. In this sense, the Hunter’s Cabin was neither a relic nor a romance, but an instrument—one among many—through which the empire organized sentiments, narratives, and natural space.

The Chicago exposition further underscored this ideological contrast by the spatial juxtaposition of the Hunter’s Cabin and its architectural counterpart: the New England Kitchen. Positioned on the Midway Plaisance, a peripheral entertainment area away from the core region, the Kitchen presented a feminized vision of nature—domestic, familial, and self-contained. ¹⁰ Sponsored by the state of Massachusetts to showcase Mrs. Robert H. Richards’s nutritional chemistry, ¹¹ it offered a sanitized microcosm of Anglo-domestic rural life. If the Hunter’s Cabin embodied the mythology of western wilderness—raw, masculine, and expansionist—the New England Kitchen signaled the waning influence of European pastoral ideals within the American cultural imagination. The two architectures illustrated more than a difference of geographic origins; they enacted divergent ecological imaginations. One emerged from the forest floor and reenacted imperial conquest through nature, while the other remained enclosed and inward-facing—a vision of order aligned with education and self-restraint. In this dialectic, the Hunter’s Cabin did not merely represent a past. It framed a future—where the empire would continue to root its legitimacy in curated nature, and where urban modernity would naturalize itself through a ritualized return to the mythic frontier.

Emerging not from industrial ingenuity but from an evolutionary imagination, the Hunter’s Cabin positioned nature as both the origin and the proving ground—a rustic threshold from which the American skyscraper could symbolically ascend. Its rough-hewn timbers staged a beginning, a narrative of transformation from wilderness to modernity. Within the ideological trajectories charted by Turner and Roosevelt alike, the cabin marked the first station in a national journey: from hunter to settler, or, from the “savage” to the “civilized.” This linearity—cast as natural—offered a teleological vision of development in which American citizens evolved alongside the land. The cabin, thus, became shorthand for a mythic compression: the quintessential American myth of “From Cabin to Presidency,” which reduced historical complexity into allegory, staging meritocracy as both memory and destiny. Here, suffering became virtue, and obscurity, a condition of legitimacy. Whether invoked through Lincoln’s log ¹² or Roosevelt’s curated frontier identity, the cabin allegorized a democratic ascent—rendering biography as a surrogate for national development, and nature as its moral terrain. But the arc did not end at the city’s edge. As the United States turned its gaze overseas, the logic that had naturalized national ascent on the domestic soil was repurposed for imperial projections abroad. The spatial politics of the frontier—ritualized in the cabin—found new life in the colonial tropes, where nature once again served to aestheticize authority.

Scenic Empire: Colonial Landscapes and the Naturalization of Power

While the Chicago exposition of 1893 staged imperial authority through symbolic landscapes, its spatial logics did not remain confined to the realm of spectacle. In the following decade, what functioned in the 1890s as allegorical displays of imperial ambition—through monumental trees, neoclassical façades, and curated islands—reappeared in the early 1900s as an enacted colonial order in America’s overseas colonies, most notably in the highlands of the Philippines. In the wake of the economic downturn of 1893, many Americans looked outward in search of markets to absorb the nation’s perceived surplus production, and the Philippines appeared to promise new economic horizons. At the outset of U.S. rule in the islands in 1900, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge (1908) ambitiously declared that “the power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, the power will be the American republic” (p. 80). Beveridge’s rhetoric of commercial expansion has often been read as emblematic of a broader imperial turn. Neil Smith (2004) argues that the territorial acquisitions of 1898, including the Philippines, signaled a new feature of U.S. global power, framing an American imperial form that exercised power through “the more abstract geography of the world market rather than through direct political control of territory” in response to European colonialism and anti-colonial struggles (p. 19). In 1963, Walter LaFeber referred to this configuration as the “new empire.” The translation of imperial ambition into material governance showed that the United States not only aspired to empire but had also begun to administer one. It reorganized Indigenous landscapes into planned urban environments, creating a new frontier overseas.

Represented most forcefully by Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive vision of the frontier did not simply mourn the closing of the Western wilderness. It advanced a new spatial logic—one that consolidated power through a technocratic elite and rearticulated nature through an imperial gaze. Nature, no longer the backdrop of national destiny, became a medium through which empire legitimized itself. Urban nature functioned as a medium of imperial legitimation by aestheticizing domination as order, and by presenting colonial reorganization as a natural extension of landscape renewal. There, a telling transposition occurred: the federal government translated the tropes of American westward expansion into the language of colonial governance. The Philippines became the new Kentucky, and the Filipino resistance the Apache—Roosevelt’s 1899 address “The Strenuous Life,” delivered before the elite Hamilton Club of Chicago, made this analogy explicit. The speech, though ostensibly a defense of U.S. occupation in the Philippines, was in fact an enunciation of elite self-fashioning. Addressing his audience as “men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character” (Roosevelt, 1926, pp. 7–8), Roosevelt positioned them as heirs to the frontier legacy—figures who, like Boone or Crockett, were summoned to carry forward civilization by taming nature’s forms and aligning them with imperial order. Anti-imperialists, by contrast, were cast as “foolish sentimentalists,” guilty not only of political naïveté but of betraying their nation’s founding ethos (Roosevelt, 1926, p. 19). In the aftermath of the geographical frontier’s disappearance, its conceptual legacy acquired renewed political force, redeployed to authorize American imperial expansion overseas. For instance, in 1960, John F. Kennedy invoked the “New Frontier” as a campaign slogan, reframing Cold War intervention as a continuation of frontier heroism. During the Vietnam War, this logic was radicalized: U.S. officials referred to contested regions as “Indian country,” casting military occupation as a modern reenactment of settler conquest (Slotkin, 1992, p. 369). Yet this new frontier, unlike the mythic openness of Boone and Crockett, was increasingly managed by a technocratic elite—those authorized to extend empire not through settlement, but through planning, capital, and administration. The majority of the nation could no longer inhabit the frontier; they could only observe it, as empire unfolded in their name.

A consequential elaboration of the symbolic frontier logic can be found in the use of urban nature to aestheticize and veil colonial domination during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines—an act that may be understood as “an imperial sleight of hand” (Manchanda & Turner, 2024, p. 2), in which historical frontiers were refashioned into new forms through the creation of urban nature. Nowhere is this logic more palpable than in Baguio, the American-designed mountain capital built upon Ibaloi pasture lands. In 1904, under the direction of Secretary of War William Howard Taft, Daniel Burnham—the chief architect of Chicago’s White City—was tasked with transforming the archipelago into a showcase of McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” Proclamation. Drawing on principles of the City Beautiful movement in the U.S., which were rooted in Progressive ideals and sought to discipline urban growth and ease social conflict through carefully designed public spaces such as parks, Burnham envisioned Baguio as both a retreat from tropical heat and a spatial inscription of the imperial order: a garden city replete with tree-lined avenues, hygienic infrastructure, and curated natural vistas.

The connection between urban nature and imperial legitimation could be seen in how landscape design and urban planning translated colonial authority into forms of civic order and ecological stewardship. By presenting the reorganization of Indigenous land as the creation of parks, boulevards, and hygienic urban spaces, urban nature naturalized imperial power and rendered it both attractive and seemingly inevitable. Styled as “Uncle Sam’s summer home” (Woolley, 1913, p. 292), Baguio presented the image of an empire at leisure—an oasis of modernity and grace amid what colonial discourse cast as a primitive landscape. Journalistic depictions likened the highlands to the Adirondacks or Wyoming (“Fourth Annual Report of the Philippine Commission,” 1903, p. 58), while travelers celebrated the city’s landscape as “designed by Jehovah and developed by man” (Carpenter, 1925, p. 85). This romanticized vision extended beyond propaganda. In Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, the protagonist marvels at Baguio’s mist-laced pine forests and fragrant valleys in the 1920s, as if nature itself affirmed the American promises of prosperity and order:

Baguio is a small city in the heart of tall mountains where the weather is always temperate... In the morning there is a light mist in the air and when you walk through it you feel as though you are walking through silk...Tall pine trees cover the mountains and at night one can hear the leaves singing in the slight wind from the deep canyons beyond the city that comes up with the sweet tang of fragrant vegetation from the surrounding valleys. (Bulosan, 1946, p. 66)

Bulosan’s portrayal operates less as descriptive record than as a literary construction that aestheticizes Baguio’s colonial transformation, translating dispossession into a pastoral idiom and naturalizing imperial authority through a sensory tableau of harmony and abundance—a vision of “peace, leisure, and economic sufficiency,” in Leo Marx’s (1964, p.23) terms.

Behind this picturesque veil lay a calculated politics of space. The transformation of Baguio from a communal pasture to the colonial summer capital entailed the expropriation of Indigenous land and the imposition of new political hierarchies. Central to this process was the dispossession of Ibaloi headman Mateo Cariño, whose family had long grazed cattle on the site. Although Cariño ceded part of his land to the Americans, the U.S. government seized additional acres, prompting his protest. His case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which recognized native title and distinguished Philippine occupation from the precedents of the American West. Yet the ruling proved hollow. By the time it was issued, Burnham’s City Beautiful plan was already remaking Baguio, translating Progressive urban ideals into a colonial register. What was presented as the harmonization of nature, commerce, and civic culture also served to aestheticize dispossession, masking the expropriation of Indigenous land beneath the rhetoric of order, leisure, and democratic uplift. By building Baguio as an oasis of America, colonialists turned the landscape into a kind of pedagogy: a showcase of what could be attained under American tutelage.

One of the finest and most desired destinations in Baguio is the garden-like Topside, the personal residence of William Cameron Forbes, who brought Burnham’s 1905 plans to realization and served as governor general from 1909 to 1913. Forbes created a Country Club in Baguio and used Topside to entertain American and Filipino elites, for instance, the former revolutionary general Emilio Aguinaldo and the future Philippine president Manuel Quezon, hoping to forge a new Filipino “ruling class” in the colony (Anderson, 1988, p. 3). With the rearrangement of the pastureslands in Baguio, Forbes in a way became the new “headman,” and Cariño and Filipinos guests on their own lands. The local elites, the baknang, saw their authority eroded as Americans seized the Cordillera lands that had long sustained their wealth, lands rich in gold reserves and used for cattle grazing for generations. Although some Igorot elites, such as the Cariños, continued to hold prominent positions as municipal presidents, their influence was in practice “effectively debased” (Tapang, 1985, p. 39).

Beyond the elites, ordinary Filipinos were also deeply implicated in the colonial reordering of natural spaces and their governance. As subsistence pasturelands gave way to parks, polo fields, and golf courses, Igorot laborers were conscripted into maintaining the aesthetic veneer of colonial gardens, often staged in their traditional attire. In this choreographed display, Americans fashioned the Igorots into living curiosities within the landscape, both as evidence of colonial mastery and as spectacles for tourists. At the same time, Filipino labor was mobilized for infrastructural projects such as the road to Baguio, a development strategically framed as a means of alleviating discontent while materially consolidating U.S. authority (Bagamaspad et al., 1985, p. 34). Yet resistance persisted. Revolutionary forces drawn from “the poorer and less-educated classes”—including farmers, cooks, playwrights, tailors, and those condemned as brigands—contested this spatial order, exposing the instability of colonial power and reminding us that gardens of order and leisure were also terrains of insurgency (Scott, 2009, p. 54).

The naturalized imperialism of the post-frontier era also extended into the realm of anthropological spectacle, where racialized others were staged as embodiments of wilderness and primitivism. Highland Igorots were mythologized in ways echoing the American Indian trope, displayed as “noble savages” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (Rydell, 2013, p. 173). Their public exhibition—condemned by several European presses—revealed a colonial order that rendered domination palatable through visual familiarity, ethnographic science, and theatricalized racial hierarchy. ¹³ In this light, Baguio emerges not only as a hilltop garden city, but as a palimpsest of imperial logics (Harvey, 1982, p. 233). Its layered landscape repurposed the Indigenous territory into a spatial metaphor of paternalism and control. If Burnham’s White City projected American empire in monumental symmetry; Baguio, by contrast, rephrased that vision into a pastoral idiom—framing the U.S. imperial rule as more than a foreign imposition, but an ecological destiny already in bloom. Designed to soothe imperial nostalgia while displaying the purported achievements of colonial discipline and ideological formation, Baguio ultimately helped to naturalize the imposition of political order by making it seem continuous with nature’s own forms and forces.

What begins as landscape ends as logic. With the frontier’s disappearance, American cultural discourse did more than mourn a lost terrain: It actively reconstructed its symbolic geography. Nature, once the opposite of civilization, was reinstalled within the very infrastructure of empire, no longer resisting modernity but constituting its rhetorical politics. Yet what these spaces naturalized was not only imperial power abroad but also the settler colonial foundations of the United States itself, which provided the historical precedent for translating nature into a vehicle of governance. Through the strategic placement of forest groves within exhibition grids, log cabins within neoclassical courts, and alpine retreats within colonial interiors, the United States revitalized both the myth of the garden and the myth of empire—crafted not only a visual architecture, but also a cultural imagination in which ecological forms were mobilized for ideological ends through a calculated re-inscription and a transformation from wilderness to urban nature, from encounter to curatorship. In this scenario, nature became a stage on which the contradictions of imperial expansion could be softened, rehearsed, and aesthetically resolved. Within this tableau, the past could be folded into the present, the rural into the urban, the national into the global—so long as it retained the appearance of natural continuity. The naturalized city, thus, is not the opposite of the frontier, but its afterlife—an afterlife that carried forward the settler colonial logics of Indigenous dispossession into the spatial politics of urban and imperial modernity. As a regeneration of power, nature bears ideological significance, and spatial politics became a form of imperial governance. To walk through these spaces was not simply to return to nature, but to enter an archive of the empire.

In the Anthropocene, the spatial logics that once naturalized empire through urban nature continue to reverberate in contemporary forms of green governance. Just as the garden city translated settler colonial expansion into ecological destiny, today’s urban nature projects often obscure the politics of migration, displacement, and unequal access to natural resources. Recognizing these continuities underscores that urban nature is never a neutral space but a terrain where power is produced, distributed, and contested.