This week London hosts a jamboree of computer geeks, politicians, and urban planners from around the world. At the Urban Age conference, they will discuss the latest whizz idea in high tech, the "smart city". Doing more than programming traffic, the smart city's computers will calculate where offices and shops can be laid out most efficiently, where people should sleep, and how all the parts of urban life should be fitted together. Science fiction? Smart cities are being built in the Middle East and in Korea; they have become a model for developers in China, and for redevelopment in Europe. Thanks to the digital revolution, at last life in cities can be brought under control. But is this a good thing?
本周伦敦请来世界各地的计算机极客，政治家和城市规划者搞了一个大聚会。 在城市年代会议上， 他们将讨论最新的高科技专家的建议 -关于’智能城市‘。在智能城市里， 计算机不仅管理交通，而且能够规划办公室和商店如何分布最有效率， 人们在什么地方睡觉最合适，以及城市生活的各个方面如何有机地结合在一起。 听上去像科幻小说吗？ 实际上在中东和韩国，人们已经开始建造智能城市了，在中国智能城市也成为了开发者的样板，对欧洲的重新开发也是这样。 由于数字革命，城市生活终于变得可控了。 但是这算是一件好事吗？
You don't have to be a romantic to doubt it. In the 1930s the American urbanist Lewis Mumford foresaw the disaster entailed by "scientific planning" of transport, embodied in the super-efficient highway, choking the city. The Swiss architecture critic Sigfried Giedion worried that after the second world war efficient building technologies would produce a soulless landscape of glass, steel, and concrete boxes. Yesterday's smart city, today's nightmare.
即使不是浪漫主义者的人也会对此存有怀疑。 在1930年代， 美国城市规划专家Lewis Mumford 预见到了’科学规划‘ 所连带的交通灾难- 超级高效的高速公路把城市堵塞起来。 瑞士建筑批评家Sigfried Giedion 担心在二次大战后的高效建筑技术会产生出一批毫无生机的玻璃，钢铁和水泥盒子。 昨天的聪明城市已经成了今天的噩梦。
The debate about good engineering has changed now because digital technology has shifted the technological focus to information processing; this can occur in handheld computers linked to "clouds", or in command-and-control centres. The danger now is that this information-rich city may do nothing to help people think for themselves or communicate well with one another.
关于何为好工程的辩论今天已经改变了， 因为数字技术已经把技术重点转移到了信息处理方面； 这一点表现在手持电脑与’云‘，或者是命令与控制中心相连。 现在的危险在于， 这种信息丰富的城市可能对于帮助人们为自己考虑或者人们之间的良好沟通并方面毫无作为。
Imagine that you are a master planner facing a blank computer screen and that you can design a city from scratch, free to incorporate every bit of high technology into your design. You might come up with Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, or Songdo, in South Korea. These are two versions of the stupefying smart city: Masdar the more famous, or infamous; Songdo the more fascinating in a perverse way.
想象你自己是一个总规划师， 面对一个空白计算机屏幕，从零开始设计一座城市， 可以在规划中包含各种高新技术。 你可能会设计出阿联酋的马斯达尔，或者韩国的松岛。他们是两个令人瞠目的智能城市版本， 马斯达尔更出名或者更不出名， 而松岛以一种反常的方式更令人着迷。
Masdar is a half-built city rising out of the desert, whose planning – overseen by the master architect Norman Foster – comprehensively lays out the activities of the city, the technology monitoring and regulating the function from a central command centre. The city is conceived in " Fordist" terms – that is, each activity has an appropriate place and time. Urbanites become consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations of where to shop, or to get a doctor, most efficiently. There's no stimulation through trial and error; people learn their city passively. "User-friendly" in Masdar means choosing menu options rather than creating the menu.
马斯达尔是在沙漠上建起的半完工城市， 由总设计师Norman Foster 主持规划， 包罗万象地涵盖了城市的功能，有一个中央控制中心来监控和规范整个城市。 整个城市是按’福特主义者‘来构思的 - 也就是说， 每一种活动都有个适当的地方和时段。 按照先前计算的最佳结果来选择去什么地方购物，去什么地方看医生。 没有了试试看之后的兴奋和刺激， 人们对城市的了解是被动的。 ‘用户友好’ 在马斯达尔意味着在现成菜单上做选择，而不是创造菜单。
Creating your own, new menu entails, as it were, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In mid 20th-century Boston, for instance, its new "brain industries" developed in places where the planners never imagined they could grow. Masdar – like London's new "ideas quarter" around Old Street – on the contrary assumes a clairvoyant sense of what should grow where. The smart city is over-zoned, defying the fact that real development in cities is often haphazard, or in between the cracks of what's allowed.
过去， 在错误的时间，去到错误的地方， 是创造你自己的菜单所必然要带来的。 例如，在20世纪中叶的波士顿，新的‘大脑产业’在规划者们完全没有想到的地方开始成长。 与过去完全相反的是， 马斯达尔像伦敦古旧街道周围的新‘创意角’一样， ，假设一种知道什么东西应该生长于什么地方的遥感术。 智能城市的分区过度智能了， 不承认城市中真正的发展经常是很偶然的， 或者正是从正式规划的’缝隙‘中产生的。
Songdo represents the stupefying smart city in its architectural aspect – massive, clean, efficient housing blocks rising up in the shadow of South Korea's western mountains, like an inflated 1960s British housing estate – but now heat, security, parking and deliveries are all controlled by a central Songdo "brain". The massive units of housing are not conceived as structures with any individuality in themselves, nor is the ensemble of these faceless buildings meant to create a sense of place.
松岛代表智能城市建筑反常的一面 - 巨大，干净，高效的房屋在韩国西部山区中拔地而起， 就像1960年代英国住宅去的膨胀版，但是现在供暖，安防，停车和送货都是受到松岛“神经中枢’控制的。 巨大的房屋单元不是按照任何个性本身的结构设计，也不是那些毫无个性的只是为了建个房子而已的建筑群。
Uniform architecture need not inevitably produce a dead environment, if there is some flexibility on the ground; in New York, for instance, along parts of Third Avenue monotonous residential towers are subdivided on street level into small, irregular shops and cafes; they give a good sense of neighbourhood. But in Songdo, lacking that principle of diversity within the block, there is nothing to be learned from walking the streets.
如果在地面规划足够有弹性的话， 上风格样式一致的建筑并不一定会造成一种死气沉沉的气氛； 例如在纽约，第三大道那些单调的住宅塔楼边上有很多小型的，不规则的店铺和咖啡馆； 这些小店给人以很舒适的邻家感觉。 但是在松岛， 街区里没有这种多样性的原则， 走在大街上看不到任何有意思的东西。
A more intelligent attempt to create a smart city comes from work currently under way in Rio de Janeiro. Rio has a long history of devastating flash floods, made worse socially by widespread poverty and violent crime. In the past people survived thanks to the complex tissues of local life; the new information technologies are now helping them, in a very different way to Masdar and Songdo. Led by IBM, with help by Cisco and other subcontractors, the technologies have been applied to forecasting physical disasters, to co-ordinating responses to traffic crises, and to organising police work on crime. The principle here is co-ordination rather than, as in Masdar and Songdo, prescription.
目前对于智能城市更聪明的一种尝试正发生在里约热内卢。 里约过去曾被毁灭性的洪水摧毁过，广泛分布的贫民区和暴力犯罪使得城市的状况更加糟糕。 以前人们之所以能够生存下来，要靠当地复杂的社区生活结构； 现在新的信息技术正在用与马斯达尔和松岛完全不同 方式帮助人们。 由IBM牵头，在Cisco和其他分包商的配合下， 新技术被用于自然灾害的预报， 协调交通事故处理，以及组织警察对抗犯罪。 这里的原则是协调，而不是像马斯达尔和松岛那样的发出指令。
But isn't this comparison unfair? Wouldn't people in the favelas prefer, if they had a choice, the pre-organised, already planned place in which to live? After all, everything works in Songdo. A great deal of research during the last decade, in cities as different as Mumbai and Chicago, suggests that once basic services are in place people don't value efficiency above all; they want quality of life. A hand-held GPS device won't, for instance, provide a sense of community. More, the prospect of an orderly city has not been a lure for voluntary migration, neither to European cities in the past nor today to the sprawling cities of South America and Asia. If they have a choice, people want a more open, indeterminate city in which to make their way; this is how they can come to take ownership over their lives.
但是难道这种比较不是很不公平的吗？ 在贫民窟里的人们如果可以选择的话， 难道不是更愿意生活在那种预先组织好的， 规划好的地方吗？ 无论如何， 松岛市各方面都能正常运转。 过去十年在像孟买和芝加哥这样完全不同的城市中的大量研究表明，一旦基本服务到位，人们就不会再关心效率问题，而是希望有更高质量的生活。 例如，手持GPS怎么也不可能带给人们社区的感觉。 不仅如此， 井然有序的城市并不是吸引人们自愿移民的诱因， 无论是过去的欧洲城市还是今天南美洲和亚洲那些蔓延发展的城市都是如此。 如果人们能够选择， 他们就会选择更加开放，有更多不确定性的城市来开创自己的生活。 只有这样他们才是真正的拥有了自己的生活。
There's nothing wicked about the smart city confab London is hosting this week. Technology is a great tool, when it's used responsively, as in Rio. But a city is not a machine; as in Masdar and Songdo, this version of the city can deaden and stupefy the people who live in its all-efficient embrace. We want cities that work well enough, but are open to the shifts, uncertainties, and mess which are real life.
本周在伦敦召开的智能城市讨论会并没有任何恶意。 当技术被适当地应用时，能够成为一种伟大的工具，就像在里约那样。 但是城市不是一台机器，不能像马斯达尔和松岛那样，那样版本的城市会在高效中使得生活其中的人们变得死气沉沉和昏头昏脑。 我们希望城市能够运转良好，但同时充满真正生活的那种变化，不确定性和混乱。