伦敦的未来 衰落还是转型(上)

Cities can implode, especially when they face a catastrophic shift in the environment to which they cannot respond.

城市会败落，特别是当它们遭遇灾难性的环境变化而无力应对时。

Petra, in Jordan, was once one of the richest cities in the world because of the Nabateans’ technological prowess in building dams and conduits to make the most of scarce water supplies. Yet when trade routes shifted to go through competing cities like Palmyra, Petra was cut off from the flows of people, goods, spices and gold that made it wealthy. Its classically inspired buildings carved out of the rock became monuments to a lost civilisation.

约旦的佩特拉(Petra)曾是世界上最富裕的城市之一，原因是凭借纳巴泰人(Nabatean)修建水坝和沟渠的非凡技艺，这个城市能够最大化地利用稀缺的水资源。然而，随着商道改从巴尔米拉(Palmyra)等与之竞争的城市穿过，人员、商品、香料和黄金的流动绕开了佩特拉——这些是使佩特拉富裕的因素。佩特拉那些受古典文化启发在岩石上凿成的建筑，变成了一个失落文明的遗迹。

Perhaps that will be the fate of the Walkie-Talkie and the Cheesegrater. Built at the height of London’s financial and property boom, they might one day be seen as reminders of a lost world. Such a thought would have seemed far-fetched a month ago, when London was basking in its own success. But since June 23, when the rest of England voted to turn its back on the EU, the city’s outlook has taken a turn for the worse.

这样的命运或许也会降临到“对讲机”(Walkie-Talkie)和“奶酪刨”(Cheesegrater)的头上。这两座建于伦敦金融和地产行业鼎盛时期的大厦，有一天也可能会被视为一个失落世界的遗迹。不久前当伦敦还沉浸在自己的成功之中时，这样的想法可能显得像是无稽之谈。但是在今年6月23日，英国其他地区在公投中选择了退出欧盟(EU)，这让伦敦的前景骤然变得糟糕起来。

London and its leaders now face five scenarios for the city’s future, each informed by a model loosely drawn from other cities that have faced similar shocks. Which route will London follow?

伦敦和其领导者现在面临着5种可能的前景。从其他遭受过类似冲击的城市中随意抽取的模型预示了这5种前景，伦敦会走上哪条道路呢？

The collapsed city

衰落

The most telling modern examples of collapsed cities are one-industry towns that failed to respond to change. A classical example is Youngstown, Ohio, which became the fastest-shrinking city in the US in the late 1970s, when its steel industry fell to bits and its population plunged from 170,000 to only 65,000. Youngstown’s civic leadership — organised around its exclusive Garden Club — compounded the original economic shock by turning on each other. Not surprisingly, it failed to attract inward investment and new talent. By contrast, co-operative and outward-looking Allentown, a steel town of similar size in Pennsylvania, revived and prospered.

关于衰落的城市，现代最有代表性的例子就是那些跟不上变化的单一工业城镇。美国俄亥俄州的扬斯敦(Youngstown)就是一个经典的例子。上世纪70年代末，扬斯敦成为美国萎缩速度最快的城市，钢铁业分崩离析，人口从17万骤降至6.5万。以排外的园艺俱乐部为核心组成的市政领导层相互攻击，导致原本的经济冲击进一步恶化。毫不奇怪，扬斯敦吸引不到外来投资和新的人才。相比之下，位于宾夕法尼亚州，规模相当，但具有协作精神的外向型钢铁城镇阿伦敦(Allentown)则实现了复兴和繁荣。

The most famous example of a city imploding, however, is Detroit. Since 1950 it has lost more than 1m people and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Much of the real estate in midtown is still empty, standing like silent witnesses to the city’s implosion and leading every visitor from a more prosperous city to wonder: how could so much go so wrong so fast? What killed Detroit was not just economics — the rise of Japanese competition in car manufacturing — but corruption in city hall and the flight of the middle classes, white and black, to the suburbs. On a Saturday morning at the Eastern Market, the hub of midtown Detroit, it is not the colours and the smells that strike one so much as the noise of the people. That’s because Midtown’s deserted streets often sound more like those of a quiet hamlet. It does not sound like a city.

不过，城市衰落最著名的例子是底特律。自1950年以来，这座城市失去了超过100万人口以及数十万个工作岗位。市中心大量房产依然空置，它们伫立在那里，静默地见证了这座城市的衰败，并让每一个从更繁荣的城市来到这里的旅客惊叹：为什么在这么短的时间里，就发生了这么多糟糕的事。杀死底特律的不仅仅是经济——日企在汽车制造业的崛起——还有市政府的腐败，以及白人和黑人中产阶级从市中心迁往郊区。周六早上在底特律市中心的东部市场(Eastern Market)走一走，颜色和气味都没有这里的喧闹让人印象深刻。因为底特律市中心荒芜的街道常常就像是静谧的小村庄一样。听起来不像是一座城市。

If London suffers a flight of European talent, driven out by an uncertainty over whether they are welcome, and by dimming economic prospects, then the city could be in trouble. The overpriced warehouses of Shoreditch, which in the past 10 years has become a tech cluster, could within another decade once again be poor but sexy.

如果在伦敦工作的欧洲人才因为怕自身受到排挤或者因为经济前景黯淡而逃离，那么伦敦就会陷入困境。过去10年成为科技企业聚集地、由仓库改造的房子如今价格高企的肖尔迪奇区(Shoreditch)再过一个十年可能重新变得“贫穷但性感”。

At first sight, that kind of flight does not seem likely. An analysis by Deloitte earlier this year found that London had 1.7m highly skilled workers, an increase of 235,000 in the past three years alone thanks to the growth of the technology sector. London has 550,000 more highly skilled jobs than New York. Many of the people filling these roles are from outside the UK. One in three Londoners was born overseas and one in 10 come from elsewhere in the EU.

乍看之下，伦敦发生人才逃离的可能性不大。德勤(Deloitte)年初发布了一项分析结果：伦敦拥有170万高技能人才。得益于科技业的发展，这类人才仅在过去3年中就增加了23.5万人。伦敦的高技能工作岗位比纽约多55万。许多高技能人才来自海外。每3个伦敦人就有一个是在海外出生的，每10个伦敦人里就有1个来自欧盟其他国家。

Walk around the city: it has huge momentum, propelled by its young, exuberant population on a scale that Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam combined cannot match. Yet there are no grounds for complacency. If there is a churn of about 30,000 highly skilled migrants a year, it would only take a decade of strict immigration controls for the highly skilled population of London to be substantially depleted by Brexit. And what would London do if it lost people who would not make it through a points-based immigration system: its 88,000 construction workers; its 78,000 food and hospitality staff; and the 57,000 admin staff who come from elsewhere in the greater European Economic Area? In an economy driven by innovation, knowledge and culture, money follows talent. London, at all costs, has to hang on to the talent.

在伦敦四处看看就会发现：这座城市拥有着充沛的活力。年轻、精力旺盛、数量比巴黎、法兰克福和阿姆斯特丹三个城市加起来还多的人口推动着这座城市运转。但是伦敦不能自满。如果1年流失3万名高技术移民，只需严格控制移民10年，伦敦的高技能人口就会因为英国退欧而大幅减少。如果失去那些无法通过积分制移民体制的人，伦敦会怎样呢：比如来自欧洲经济区(EEA)其他地方的8.8万名建筑工人、7.8万名餐饮服务业从业人员，以及5.7万名行政人员？在一个依靠创新、知识和文化驱动的经济中，金钱是随着人才走的。伦敦必须不计一切代价留住人才。

An inward turn

向内转

A slightly less scary scenario is that London could go back to where it has come from. It could become once more a British city, rather than a cosmopolitan one. Brexit could lead to London being renationalised.

另一种前景稍微没那么可怕，那就是伦敦可能会回到过去：从一个国际化的大都市，再次变回一个英国的城市。英国退欧可能会导致伦敦再度“本国化”。

This would return the city to the role it played in the 1950s, when it hosted the Festival of Britain, introducing the rest of the country to the modern world, when the Finsbury Health Centre offered a vision of Britain with an NHS that people up and down the country could identify with. London is after all still home to most British institutions: the British Museum, British Library, British Broadcasting Corporation and so on.

伦敦可能会回归其在上世纪50年代扮演的角色，当时伦敦举办了“英国节”(Festival of Britain)，将这个国家的其他地方介绍给当代世界，当时该市芬斯伯里区的健康中心展现了关于英国的一个构想，即建立一种全国上下都能认同的国家医疗服务体系(NHS)。现在伦敦终归还是大多数英国机构的所在地：大英博物馆(British Museum)、大英图书馆(British Library)、英国广播公司(BBC)等等。

The Leave vote was intended to rein London in, to close the yawning gap between the city and the rest of the country. Perhaps this could be the moment when the provinces and suburbs take back their capital, in the process forcing it to share more of its prosperity with the rest of the UK. Jobs might not just go to mainland Europe but also to Stoke and Sunderland. London might go slower but perhaps that would be no bad thing, as the architecture critic Rowan Moore puts it in his book on London, Slow Burn City: “The ideal is that cities burn slowly. Their social ecologies and physical forms should renew through change, not be devastated by it.”

英国投票退欧意在抑制伦敦，缩小其和英国其他地区间日益扩大的差距。其他地区从此或许可以重新获得它们的首都，迫使伦敦与英国其他地区共享繁荣。工作机会不再只流向欧洲大陆，还会流向斯托克城(Stoke)和桑德兰(Sunderland)。伦敦可能会发展得更慢，但或许这并不是一件坏事，就如建筑评论家罗恩•穆尔(Rowan Moore)在有关伦敦(London)的著作《慢火城市》(Slow Burn City)中写道：“理想的情况是城市会慢慢的燃烧。它们的社会生态和物理形态应该通过变化而得到更新，而不是被变化摧毁。”

Would it be so bad for London to have a few fallow years? New life would emerge in the cracks of a city that would be more affordable and more British in its orientation.

对伦敦来说，休眠几年真的那么糟糕么？物价更合理，定位更英国化，会让伦敦焕发新生。

One of the most striking — and tragic — examples of a cosmopolitan city that was nationalised is Salonica, the extraordinarily diverse Ottoman city that was ruled by Muslims between 1430 and 1912, in which Jewish industrialists lived next to Turkish army officers, Greek merchants, Bulgarian traders, and many more. A shoeshine boy in Salonica needed mastery of eight or nine languages. Salonica was a multifaith city until the early 20th century, when a combination of war, depression, nationalism and ideology led to its ethnic cleansing. By 1950 it was Thessaloniki, 95 per cent Greek and almost entirely Christian.

在从国际大都市重新国家化的城市中，萨洛尼卡(Salonica)的例子最具悲剧色彩也最惊人。这座极其多元化的奥斯曼(Ottoman)城市在1430年到1912年间由穆斯林统治。在这座城市里，犹太实业家、土耳其军官、希腊商人、保加利亚贸易商等各色人比邻而居，萨洛尼卡的擦鞋童需要掌握八、九种语言。萨洛尼卡曾经是一座多元信仰的城市，直到20世纪初，在战争、经济萧条、民族主义和意识形态的共同作用下，这座城市遭到了种族清洗。到1950年，这座城市的名字变成了塞萨洛尼基(Thessaloniki)，城中95%的人口都是希腊人，几乎全部都是基督徒。

London will not suffer that fate but it is being brought to heel by a political instruction to take greater heed of national identity. A slightly different model for its future, as Tyler Brûlé pointed out in this newspaper, is Montreal. As the capital of French-speaking Quebec, Montreal in the 1980s turned its back on the English-speaking, international business world, which was anyway already migrating to Toronto, in the name of greater equality for French speakers. Critics say the result is a melancholy city with lots of lovely old streets with boarded-up houses and shops. Defenders would say Montreal is happy with its lot, home to much cross-cultural creativity, symbolised by Cirque du Soleil, and busy promoting homegrown social innovation.

伦敦不会遭遇那样的命运，但它正受制于一种认为应该更多着眼于国家认同的政治观点。就如泰勒•布鲁勒(Tyler Brûlé)在英国《金融时报》中撰文指出的，对于伦敦的未来，一个略微不同的模型是蒙特利尔(Montreal)。上世纪80年代，作为加拿大法语区魁北克省最大的城市，蒙特利尔借着给予法语人群更大平等的名义，疏远了说英语的国际商业界——不过那个时候商业已经在向多伦多迁移了。批评者说，这样的结果是让蒙特利尔成为了一个忧郁的城市，纵使其有很多迷人的老街，但是那里的房屋和商店都被木板封上了。捍卫者则说，蒙特利尔满意于自己的境况，它是跨文化创新之乡，太阳马戏团(Cirque du Soleil)就是代表，它还忙于推动本土社会创新。

This renationalisation assumes, of course, that there is a coherent Britain for London to represent. That, too, is far from certain.

当然，“再国家化”需要前提，那就是要有个浑然一体的英国，这样伦敦才能够代表英国。这同样一点都不能确定。