城市的未來發展 不要扼殺城市的獨特性
The future of the city is an industry. Cities have always been big business, machines for creating money and culture, a means for people to gather and create a civilised, comfortable life. The making of the city is itself a fundamental process in the development of capitalism. The city’s property and infrastructure have always been vehicles for speculation and, on occasion, stupendous profit.
城市的未來發展是一項產業。城市一直以來都是一門大生意，是創造財富與文化的機器，是將人們匯聚在一起、創造文明舒適生活的一種機制。城市的形成本身就是資本主義發展進程中的一個基礎階段。城市的房地產和基礎設施一直是投機活動的載體，有些時候還會帶來巨大的利潤。
The modern, successful city is a realisation of what the late French film-maker and provocateur Guy Debord forecast would be a “Society of Spectacle”. Within this, success is gauged by skyscrapers and super-luxury apartments that come with record prices attached. It is measured by blockbuster cultural institutions and shopping streets sparkling with the logos of global brands. It is assessed by spurious quality of life surveys that rate the availability of exotic coffees and artisan cheeses above the quality of social housing or healthcare.
成功的現代城市已經把已故法國電影導演及先鋒活動家居伊•德波(Guy Debord)所預言的《景觀社會》(Society of Spectacle)變爲現實。在景觀社會中，成功是由摩天大樓以及價格創紀錄的超豪華公寓來判定的，是由大型文化機構以及閃耀着國際大牌標誌的購物街來衡量的，是由站不住腳的生活質量調查來評判的，這些調查將能否享受到異國情調的咖啡和傳統手工奶酪看得比社會保障性住房(social housing)和醫療保健服務的質量更重要。
Over the past decade or so, the city has been monetised as a futures market — not only in the old fashioned manner of property development and speculation but through reconceiving its inhabitants as consumers rather than citizens. We have all become data. The technology we use at home, in the office and, above all, carry in our pockets has radically transformed the way we can be tracked and the way we will be targeted.
在過去的十來年中，城市經歷貨幣化成爲了一個期貨市場——不僅僅是通過房地產開發及投機這種傳統方式，還通過將城市居民重新看作是消費者而非公民。我們都變成了數據，我們在家中、在辦公室使用以及放在口袋裏隨身攜帶的技術，已顯著地改變了我們被追蹤以及我們被當作服務目標的方式。
The city’s characteristic cocktail of anonymity and sociability — the potential to become lost in a crowd — is changing fast. Already, smartphones have transformed the way we use the city. Our reliance on Google Maps and apps strips us of our observation and our need to understand the grain and texture of the city streets. Disruptive apps such as Uber are changing the way we move around.
城市所特有的匿名性和社交性的融合——也即在人羣中消失的可能性——正在迅速變化。智能手機已經改變了我們與城市的相處模式。我們對谷歌地圖以及各種應用的依賴剝奪了我們自己對於城市的觀察，也讓我們變得不再需要去理解城市街道的紋理。優步(Uber)等顛覆性的應用正在改變我們的出行方式。
How do we make a sustainable city, in which citizens are treated with respect rather than as data? How will they compete with each other beyond being mere vehicles for property investment or as instruments of the markets?
我們應如何打造一座可持續發展的城市，使城市中的居民受到尊敬而非僅僅被看作數字？除了作爲地產投資的載體或者作爲市場的工具，城市之間又將如何競爭？
There is a lot of hype surrounding the so-called Smart City — the idea of the city as a connected network in which mass information collection allows more efficient operation. Its potential has been overstated, but its arrival does signal a change in the idea of the city into a forum for hyper-surveillance and data farming. That change is compounded by a marked shift from the city as public realm to a new conception of its streets and squares as a massive mall without walls.
當前圍繞所謂的“智慧城市”(smart city)有大量炒作——這一概念將城市看成是一個緊密相連的網絡，網絡中的大規模數據收集使更有效率的運作成爲可能。智慧城市的潛力被過分誇大，但其出現是一個信號，表明有關城市的概念正在逐漸轉變爲有關超級監管以及數據耕耘(data farming)的論壇。這一轉變還伴隨着城市觀點的一個顯著變化，對城市的認知從公共領域變成了將街道和廣場看作沒有圍牆的巨型購物中心的新觀念。
The creation of business investment districts across the UK and US and the construction of privately owned developments blur the boundaries between the genuine public commons and private property. As the public sector continues to shrink in the neoliberal city, infrastructure is increasingly left to private capital and the economies of cities are driven by the mantra of “regeneration”.
英美各地出現的商業投資區、以及私人所有開發項目的建設模糊了真正的公共空間與私人地產之間的界限。隨着公共部門在新自由主義的城市中繼續萎縮，基礎設施建設正越來越多由私人資本承擔，而推動城市經濟的則是“重建”準則。
This has become a cliché and it can be a very blunt device. The line between regeneration and gentrification is often virtually invisible. There is, of course, nothing new in these issues. When the notorious Old Nichol slums in London’s East End were cleared to make way for the London County Council’s Boundary Estate, opened in 1900, residents complained that they were being turfed out. The hard drinkers were discriminated against in favour of what politicians might now call “hard working families”.
這已經成了陳詞濫調，而且可以成爲一種非常粗暴的手段。重建和“中產階級化”的界限常常是幾乎不可見的。當然，關於這些問題完全沒有任何新鮮之處。當倫敦東區(East End)聲名狼藉的老尼科爾(Old Nichol)貧民區被清理出來，爲倫敦郡議會(London County Council)修建包恩德里住宅區(Boundary Estate)讓路時——該住宅區於1900年建成——住在老尼科爾的居民抱怨自己被趕了出來。那些酒鬼受到了歧視，得到優待的則是或許會被如今的政治家稱爲“勤勞的工薪家庭”的羣體。
The urban renewal strategies of the 1960s and 1970s in US city centres were dismissed by African-Americans in poorer districts as designed to remove them. In London more recently, the efforts to demolish and rebuild many of the few remaining city centre social housing estates — notably the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, in the southeast of the capital — have led to protest and squatting, as residents accuse the authorities of social cleansing.
二十世紀六七十年代美國城市中心的城區重建計劃遭到了貧窮街區非裔美國人的反對，他們指責此類計劃是爲了將他們趕走。更晚些時候在倫敦，對於城市中心少數保存下來的社會住宅區，爲將其中的一大部分拆除和重建所做的努力——特別是倫敦東南部南華克區(Southwark)的艾爾斯伯裏(Aylesbury)住宅區——引發了抗議和擅自佔用房屋的情況，當地居民指責當局藉機進行社會清洗。
The question for city centres is how they can embrace the complexity of uses and the social mix from which their character has derived — and whether there is any way to maintain these communities and relationships. Or alternatively, do we just accept that cities change and that we need to adapt?
城市中心面臨的問題是，如何才能承載好複雜多樣的功能以及容納作爲城市自身特色來源的多元化社會羣體——此外是否還有維持這些社區和關係的辦法？或者說，我們是不是就應接受城市會發生變化，而我們需要適應這種變化的事實？
For the moment, there is a sense that New York, London, Paris and other global cities are resting on their laurels. They revel in their continued popularity and the status of their property as what the City of London’s former planner, Peter Rees called “safe deposit boxes” for the super-rich, while failing to ensure they remain accessible to a social mix.
就目前而言，紐約、倫敦、巴黎以及其他國際大都市給人一種躺在往日榮光中不思進取的感覺。這些城市陶醉於它們仍然受到的歡迎以及城中地產作爲超富階層“保險箱”的地位——用倫敦金融城前規劃官彼得•李斯(Peter Rees)的話來說——而未能確保這些地產仍然能夠容納多元化的社會羣體。
These are real problems, because what makes cities great is the dynamism that derives from their particular cocktails of class, ethnicity, eccentricity and opportunity. Without that blend they become either dull tourist centres — take central Paris, for example, or, increasingly, central London — with little authentic life, or two-tier cities with the poor populations marginalised on the edges and effectively disenfranchised from urban processes. Paris, again, strikes as an example.
以上都是實實在在的問題，因爲使城市變得偉大的正是階層、種族、特異性和機遇的特定融合所產生的活力。沒有了這種融合，城市要麼變成枯燥無聊的旅遊中心——例如巴黎中心城區，或者倫敦市中心也愈發如此——幾乎沒有真實的生活氣息，要麼變成兩級分化的城市，貧困人口被邊緣化至城郊生活，在事實上被剝奪了參與城市運轉過程的權利。在這方面巴黎也可以作爲例子。
The most successful and creative cities tend to be those with a degree of redundancy, that is to say with a little slack in their space where property value does not dictate every move or development. These are not necessarily the same as those cities that are the wealthiest or the most equitable or even the most liveable.
最成功而富有創造力的城市，通常是那些具有一定冗餘的城市，也就是說，在城市的空間裏存在些微餘地，那裏的遷移或者開發並不全由房產價值決定。這些城市並不一定是那些最富有的或者最平等的城市，甚至不一定是最宜居的。
New York, for instance, was at a creative peak in the period after the second world war and, arguably, again in the 1970s, when it was virtually bankrupt, sliding into a massive crime wave and suffering from radical depopulation as the middle class moved out to the suburbs. Everything from abstract expressionism and jazz to literature and graphics thrived there in that period.
以紐約爲例，它的創造力巔峯期是在第二次世界大戰結束以後以及二十世紀七十年代，雖然後一段時期存在爭議。二十世紀七十年代的紐約幾近破產，陷入了大規模犯罪潮，並因中產階級搬至郊區而遭遇了人口的急劇減少。但當時從抽象表現主義和爵士音樂到文學和繪畫藝術等各種藝術形式都在紐約蓬勃發展。
London’s greatest modern creative spurt may well have been during roughly the same period, namely from the Swinging Sixties to the mid-1980s, when it was a city in transition, pockmarked with bomb sites and with social housing going up in once-affluent and central areas.
倫敦重要的現代創造力噴涌期差不多也在同一時期，即從搖擺的六十年代(Swinging Sixties)到二十世紀八十年代中期。當時的倫敦是一座變化中的城市，既有坑坑窪窪的炸彈爆炸痕跡，也有在曾經的中心富人區拔地而起的社會住宅（social housing，類似有些國家或地區的廉租房——編者注）。
Berlin’s best periods were the fraught 1920s, when the city was recovering from a devastating lost war, and the 1990s, when it found a huge property resource in the office space left over when the Communist political bureaucracy — and the endless web of buildings inhabited by the Stasi intelligence network — was dismantled and left redundant. This all left property affordable and available to students, artists and anyone else.
柏林的黃金時代是激盪的二十世紀二十年代，當時這座城市正從一場極具破壞力的失敗戰爭中恢復過來；此外還有二十世紀九十年代，柏林從共產主義政治官僚體系解體後留存下來並閒置的辦公空間中——還包括斯塔西（Stasi，前東德國家安全部）情報網絡所佔用的難以計數的房屋——獲得了大量地產資源。這使得住房對於學生、藝術家以及任何其他人來說都變得可以獲得並且負擔得起。
The traditional measures of success — wealth and GDP — might serve to underline profitability and suitability of the city as a place for the global rich to park their money, but they do little to ensure that success will be sustained.
衡量成功的傳統標準——例如財富和GDP——或許能夠凸顯城市作爲全球富豪投資載體的盈利性和適宜性，但這些指標對於確保城市的成功能夠延續幾乎沒有幫助。
When cities become too successful, they marginalise exactly the eccentricity and experimentation that lead to new ideas. An overdose of success can kill a city.
當城市變得過於成功，它們就會將能夠產生新創意的特異性和實驗精神邊緣化。過量的成功能夠殺死一座城市。
Perhaps the message is to be careful what you wish for.
這對於我們的啓示或許是，許願時要小心。
