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 capitalism¹. The city’s property and infrastructure² have always been vehicles for speculation³ and, on occasion, stupendous profit.

城市的未来发展是一项产业。城市一直以来都是一门大生意，是创造财富与文化的机器，是将人们汇聚在一起、创造文明舒适生活的一种机制。城市的形成本身就是资本主义发展进程中的一个基础阶段。城市的房地产和基础设施一直是投机活动的载体，有些时候还会带来巨大的利润。

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 gauged⁴ by skyscrapers⁵ 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.

成功的现代城市已经把已故法国电影导演及先锋活动家居伊•德波(Guy Debord)所预言的《景观社会》(Society of Spectacle)变为现实。在景观社会中，成功是由摩天大楼以及价格创纪录的超豪华公寓来判定的，是由大型文化机构以及闪耀着国际大牌标志的购物街来衡量的，是由站不住脚的生活质量调查来评判的，这些调查将能否享受到异国情调的咖啡和传统手工奶酪看得比社会保障性住房(social housing)和医疗保健服务的质量更重要。

Over the past decade or so, the city has been monetised as a futures⁶ 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 radically⁸ transformed the way we can be tracked and the way we will be targeted.

在过去的十来年中，城市经历货币化成为了一个期货市场——不仅仅是通过房地产开发及投机这种传统方式，还通过将城市居民重新看作是消费者而非公民。我们都变成了数据，我们在家中、在办公室使用以及放在口袋里随身携带的技术，已显著地改变了我们被追踪以及我们被当作服务目标的方式。

The city’s characteristic cocktail⁹ of anonymity¹⁰ and sociability¹¹ — 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 texture¹² 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——也即在人群中消失的可能性——正在迅速变化。智能手机已经改变了我们与城市的相处模式。我们对谷歌地图以及各种应用的依赖剥夺了我们自己对于城市的观察，也让我们变得不再需要去理解城市街道的纹理。优步(Uber)等颠覆性的应用正在改变我们的出行方式。

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 mere¹³ vehicles for property investment or as instruments of the markets?

我们应如何打造一座可持续发展的城市，使城市中的居民受到尊敬而非仅仅被看作数字？除了作为地产投资的载体或者作为市场的工具，城市之间又将如何竞争？

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 forum¹⁴ 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.

当前围绕所谓的“智慧城市”(smart city)有大量炒作——这一概念将城市看成是一个紧密相连的网络，网络中的大规模数据收集使更有效率的运作成为可能。智慧城市的潜力被过分夸大，但其出现是一个信号，表明有关城市的概念正在逐渐转变为有关超级监管以及数据耕耘(data farming)的论坛。这一转变还伴随着城市观点的一个显著变化，对城市的认知从公共领域变成了将街道和广场看作没有围墙的巨型购物中心的新观念。

The creation of business investment districts across the UK and US and the construction of privately¹⁵ owned developments blur¹⁶ the boundaries between the genuine public commons and private property. As the public sector¹⁷ 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”.

英美各地出现的商业投资区、以及私人所有开发项目的建设模糊了真正的公共空间与私人地产之间的界限。随着公共部门在新自由主义的城市中继续萎缩，基础设施建设正越来越多由私人资本承担，而推动城市经济的则是“重建”准则。

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 Estate¹⁹, opened in 1900, residents complained that they were being turfed out. The hard drinkers were discriminated²⁰ against in favour of what politicians might now call “hard working families”.

这已经成了陈词滥调，而且可以成为一种非常粗暴的手段。重建和“中产阶级化”的界限常常是几乎不可见的。当然，关于这些问题完全没有任何新鲜之处。当伦敦东区(East End)声名狼藉的老尼科尔(Old Nichol)贫民区被清理出来，为伦敦郡议会(London County Council)修建包恩德里住宅区(Boundary Estate)让路时——该住宅区于1900年建成——住在老尼科尔的居民抱怨自己被赶了出来。那些酒鬼受到了歧视，得到优待的则是或许会被如今的政治家称为“勤劳的工薪家庭”的群体。

The urban renewal²¹ 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 demolish²² and rebuild many of the few remaining city centre social housing estates — notably²³ the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, in the southeast of the capital — have led to protest and squatting²⁴, as residents accuse the authorities of social cleansing²⁵.

二十世纪六七十年代美国城市中心的城区重建计划遭到了贫穷街区非裔美国人的反对，他们指责此类计划是为了将他们赶走。更晚些时候在伦敦，对于城市中心少数保存下来的社会住宅区，为将其中的一大部分拆除和重建所做的努力——特别是伦敦东南部南华克区(Southwark)的艾尔斯伯里(Aylesbury)住宅区——引发了抗议和擅自占用房屋的情况，当地居民指责当局借机进行社会清洗。

The question for city centres is how they can embrace the complexity²⁶ of uses and the social mix from which their character has derived²⁷ — 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?

城市中心面临的问题是，如何才能承载好复杂多样的功能以及容纳作为城市自身特色来源的多元化社会群体——此外是否还有维持这些社区和关系的办法？或者说，我们是不是就应接受城市会发生变化，而我们需要适应这种变化的事实？

For the moment, there is a sense that New York, London, Paris and other global cities are resting on their laurels²⁸. They revel²⁹ 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，纽约、伦敦、巴黎以及其他国际大都市给人一种躺在往日荣光中不思进取的感觉。这些城市陶醉于它们仍然受到的欢迎以及城中地产作为超富阶层“保险箱”的地位——用伦敦金融城前规划官彼得•李斯(Peter Rees)的话来说——而未能确保这些地产仍然能够容纳多元化的社会群体。

These are real problems, because what makes cities great is the dynamism that derives³⁰ from their particular cocktails³¹ of class, ethnicity, eccentricity³² and opportunity. Without that blend they become either dull tourist centres — take central Paris, for example, or, increasingly, central London — with little authentic³³ 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.

以上都是实实在在的问题，因为使城市变得伟大的正是阶层、种族、特异性和机遇的特定融合所产生的活力。没有了这种融合，城市要么变成枯燥无聊的旅游中心——例如巴黎中心城区，或者伦敦市中心也愈发如此——几乎没有真实的生活气息，要么变成两级分化的城市，贫困人口被边缘化至城郊生活，在事实上被剥夺了参与城市运转过程的权利。在这方面巴黎也可以作为例子。

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 dictate³⁴ every move or development. These are not necessarily the same as those cities that are the wealthiest or the most equitable³⁵ or even the most liveable.

最成功而富有创造力的城市，通常是那些具有一定冗余的城市，也就是说，在城市的空间里存在些微余地，那里的迁移或者开发并不全由房产价值决定。这些城市并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 radical⁷ depopulation as the middle class moved out to the suburbs. Everything from abstract expressionism and jazz to literature and graphics³⁶ thrived there in that period.

以纽约为例，它的创造力巅峰期是在第二次世界大战结束以后以及二十世纪七十年代，虽然后一段时期存在争议。二十世纪七十年代的纽约几近破产，陷入了大规模犯罪潮，并因中产阶级搬至郊区而遭遇了人口的急剧减少。但当时从抽象表现主义和爵士音乐到文学和绘画艺术等各种艺术形式都在纽约蓬勃发展。

London’s greatest modern creative spurt³⁷ 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.

伦敦重要的现代创造力喷涌期差不多也在同一时期，即从摇摆的六十年代(Swinging Sixties)到二十世纪八十年代中期。当时的伦敦是一座变化中的城市，既有坑坑洼洼的炸弹爆炸痕迹，也有在曾经的中心富人区拔地而起的社会住宅（social housing，类似有些国家或地区的廉租房——编者注）。

Berlin’s best periods were the fraught³⁸ 1920s, when the city was recovering from a devastating³⁹ 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 dismantled⁴⁰ and left redundant⁴¹. This all left property affordable⁴² and available to students, artists and anyone else.

柏林的黄金时代是激荡的二十世纪二十年代，当时这座城市正从一场极具破坏力的失败战争中恢复过来；此外还有二十世纪九十年代，柏林从共产主义政治官僚体系解体后留存下来并闲置的办公空间中——还包括斯塔西（Stasi，前东德国家安全部）情报网络所占用的难以计数的房屋——获得了大量地产资源。这使得住房对于学生、艺术家以及任何其他人来说都变得可以获得并且负担得起。

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.

衡量成功的传统标准——例如财富和GDP——或许能够凸显城市作为全球富豪投资载体的盈利性和适宜性，但这些指标对于确保城市的成功能够延续几乎没有帮助。

When cities become too successful, they marginalise exactly the eccentricity and experimentation⁴³ that lead to new ideas. An overdose of success can kill a city.

当城市变得过于成功，它们就会将能够产生新创意的特异性和实验精神边缘化。过量的成功能够杀死一座城市。

Perhaps the message is to be careful what you wish for.

这对于我们的启示或许是，许愿时要小心。