谁能"挡住"智能化城市的脚步

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。