口译时事：纽约之美并非规划而来

　　The Financial Times reader visiting New York might typically stay or shop in midtown and speed to Wall Street by car or subway. With a few hours to spare, I chose to wander in the area in between, with no particular destination in mind. Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Bowery and the Lower East Side are full of quirky buildings, eccentric shops and charming cafés, and layer upon layer of American social history.

　　通常，造访纽约的英国《金融时报》读者们可能会在曼哈顿中城区停留或购物，然后驱车或乘地铁迅速前往华尔街。我有几小时空闲时间，于是选择在两者之间的区域漫无目的地闲逛。在格林威治村(Greenwich Village)、切尔西街(Chelsea)、包厘街(Bowery)以及下东区(Lower East Side)，随处可见造型奇特的建筑、奇奇怪怪的商店以及迷人的咖啡馆。除此之外，还可以看到层层沉淀下来的美国社会史的印记。

　　This is hardly an original observation. It was made to brilliant effect 50 years ago by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That book was the product of her campaign to stop Robert Moses, the city and state public works executive, building the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated highway that would have enabled motorists to speed directly from Queens to New Jersey via the Williamsburg Bridge and the Holland Tunnel. In the process, it would have destroyed the character of the area through which it passed.

　　这种看法很难说是我的原创。50年前，简 雅各布斯(Jane Jacobs)在她的《美国大城市的死与生》(The Death and Life of Great American Cities)一书中已经将这种看法阐述得淋漓尽致。雅各布斯参与了阻止罗伯特 摩西(Robert Moses，主管纽约市和纽约州一些市政工作)修建曼哈顿下城高速路(Lower Manhattan Expressway)的运动，撰写此书也是为了给运动造势。曼哈顿下城高速路是一条高架高速路，能让驾车者从纽约皇后区(Queens)通过威廉斯堡大桥(Williamsburg Bridge)和荷兰隧道(Holland Tunnel)直接快速抵达新泽西州。在修建过程中，这条路可能会破坏所经地区的风貌。

　　Jacobs explained, through meticulous observation, how the life of cities is the product of multiple, unplanned social interactions. The density of urban living, far from being an evil, is the source of its vitality. Short streets divided into many blocks lead residents and visitors to take a multiplicity of routes and acquire a variety of experiences. Jacobs explained why the planned cities of the world such as Canberra, Brasília, Chandigarh and Letchworth Garden City are so boring. And her readers were told how the expressways Moses had built had damaged the life of the outer boroughs of New York.

　　通过细致入微的观察，雅各布斯解释了为何城市生活是许多未经规划的社会交往的产物。城市人口的密集远非坏事，而是城市的活力之源。分成许多段的短街让居民和游客能够选择各种路线，获得各种不同体验。雅各布斯还解释了，为何在世界各地，那些规划出来的城市如此乏味，比如澳大利亚的堪培拉、巴西的巴西利亚、印度的昌迪加尔和英国的莱奇沃思花园城。雅各布斯还告诉读者，摩西过去主持修建的一些高速路是如何破坏了纽约周边的市镇生活。

　　Jacobs won her battle – the Lower Manhattan Expressway was abandoned. But she also won a much larger war. Moses, perhaps the most powerful man in New York for half a century, was finally ousted in 1968. The bulldozers that razed Penn Station were halted before they reached Grand Central. The ramifications extended far beyond that city. Within a decade, the era of modernist architecture was over. Town planning became more modest in conception and incremental in execution.

　　雅各布斯打赢了这场战斗——修建曼哈顿下城高速路的计划被放弃了。但不仅如此，她还打赢了一场大得多的战争。半个世纪以来，摩西在纽约或许可说一直能呼风唤雨，而在1968年，他最终被赶下了“神坛”。推土机曾将纽约宾州车站(Penn Station)夷为了平地，但在抵达纽约中央车站(Grand Central Terminal)之前就被叫停。雅各布斯行动的影响范围远远超出了纽约市。在不到十年之后，现代主义建筑的时代宣告终结。城镇规划在构想上变得更为谨慎，在执行中采取了更为循序渐进的方式。

　　If unplanned social interactions are the key to a vibrant city, they are also the key to a vibrant organisation. I do not suppose Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer ever met Jane Jacobs, and the technology executive might have found little in common with the community activist. But there are clear analogies between Yahoo’s retreat from home teleworking and Jacobs’ rout of the town planners.

　　如果说未经规划的社会交往是城市获得活力的关键，那么它也是机构获得活力的关键。我并不认为雅虎(Yahoo)的梅里莎 梅尔(Marissa Mayer)曾见过简 雅各布斯，前者是执掌一家技术企业的经理人，而雅各布斯是一位社区活动家，两人可能没有多少共同点。但雅虎不再允许员工在家远程工作的原因，与雅各布斯用以击败城镇规划者的逻辑有明显的共通之处。

　　The enthusiasts for the virtual organisation, like the designers of the planned city, seek to impose a structure of rational organisation on a system they understand only imperfectly. Teleworking is the equivalent in cyber space of the corridor of offices, each with its own closed door. Modern office architects have abandoned the corridor in favour of open spaces where communication does not require the deliberation involved in opening an office door, picking up a telephone or sending email. “Communications and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side” – the memo is Yahoo’s, the sentiment is Jacobs’.

　　与人造城市的规划者一样，虚拟化办公的热情支持者试图把一种合理组织结构强加到一个他们并没有完全理解的体系之上。远程工作等价于网络版的办公室走廊，走廊边每间办公室都有一扇属于自己的紧闭的大门。现代办公室设计已抛弃了走廊，代之以开放空间，在开放空间中，与他人交流不需要刻意打开办公室门、提起电话或发送电子邮件。“交流与合作将十分重要，因此我们需要同在一处工作。”——这句话出自雅虎的备忘录，不过其中的理念却与雅各布斯的如出一辙。

　　Jacobs aroused the ire of town planners, who thought their schemes would usher in a rational world populated by the happy faces seen in architects’ drawings. Yahoo faces similar criticism from technophiles who find it difficult to distinguish a Facebook friendship from a hug. People such as Roy Kurzweil, the inventor of optical character recognition and speech-to-text processing. His latest book, How to Create a Mind, carries in its subtitle the immodest promise of “the secret of human thought revealed”.

　　雅各布斯当年惹恼了那些城镇规划者，他们认为自己的设计会带来一个合理的世界，在这个世界里，建筑蓝图上那种典型的幸福脸孔将随处可见。雅虎也面临类似的批评，批评者是那些难以区分Facebook上的虚拟友谊与一个真实拥抱的技术狂人，比如，光学字符识别(OCR)系统及语音转文字(speech-to-text processing)系统的发明者罗伊 库日韦尔(Roy Kurzweil)。他在最新著作《如何创造智慧》(How to Create a Mind)的副标题中作出了一个极为自负的承诺：本书将揭示“人类思维的奥秘”。

　　Mr Kurzweil argues that human thought is based on recognition of a finite number of patterns. It follows that machines can – and soon will, in 2029 to be precise – replace human intelligence. All that is required is a suitably large encyclopedia of recognisable patterns. Town planners similarly thought they could list the functions required for a city and fit each in well-ordered places. Like Moses, Mr Kurzweil has some insight into human thinking and the requirements of modern life, but not enough. Jacobs’ approach was more finely tuned to the nuances of everyday behaviour. A walk around the parts of downtown Manhattan where she lived and which she loved reveals the failures of imagination of the planners of yesterday and today.

　　库日韦尔认为，人类思维的基础是对有限数量模式的识别。从这一点可以得出结论，机器智能可以取代人类智能，并且这一天很快就会到来，准确地说，就在2029年。为此，机器需要的只是一本包含足够多可识别模式的大百科全书。城镇规划者的想法与此类似，他们认为自己可以列出城市需要的所有功能，并通过良好的规划让每一种功能都得到满足。与摩西类似，库日韦尔确实发现了人类思想和现代生活需求的部分本质，但是他的认识远远不够。雅各布斯的方式能够更好地适应人们日常行为的各种微妙差异。漫步于曼哈顿下城那些雅各布斯生活过和热爱的地方，能让人体会到，无论是过去还是现在，城镇规划者们的想象力是何等贫乏。


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