倫敦的未來 衰落還是轉型(上)

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

城市會敗落，特別是當它們遭遇災難性的環境變化而無力應對時。

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.

約旦的佩特拉(Petra)曾是世界上最富裕的城市之一，原因是憑藉納巴泰人(Nabatean)修建水壩和溝渠的非凡技藝，這個城市能夠最大化地利用稀缺的水資源。然而，隨着商道改從巴爾米拉(Palmyra)等與之競爭的城市穿過，人員、商品、香料和黃金的流動繞開了佩特拉——這些是使佩特拉富裕的因素。佩特拉那些受古典文化啓發在岩石上鑿成的建築，變成了一個失落文明的遺蹟。

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.

這樣的命運或許也會降臨到“對講機”(Walkie-Talkie)和“奶酪刨”(Cheesegrater)的頭上。這兩座建於倫敦金融和地產行業鼎盛時期的大廈，有一天也可能會被視爲一個失落世界的遺蹟。不久前當倫敦還沉浸在自己的成功之中時，這樣的想法可能顯得像是無稽之談。但是在今年6月23日，英國其他地區在公投中選擇了退出歐盟(EU)，這讓倫敦的前景驟然變得糟糕起來。

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?

倫敦和其領導者現在面臨着5種可能的前景。從其他遭受過類似衝擊的城市中隨意抽取的模型預示了這5種前景，倫敦會走上哪條道路呢？

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.

關於衰落的城市，現代最有代表性的例子就是那些跟不上變化的單一工業城鎮。美國俄亥俄州的揚斯敦(Youngstown)就是一個經典的例子。上世紀70年代末，揚斯敦成爲美國萎縮速度最快的城市，鋼鐵業分崩離析，人口從17萬驟降至6.5萬。以排外的園藝俱樂部爲核心組成的市政領導層相互攻擊，導致原本的經濟衝擊進一步惡化。毫不奇怪，揚斯敦吸引不到外來投資和新的人才。相比之下，位於賓夕法尼亞州，規模相當，但具有協作精神的外向型鋼鐵城鎮阿倫敦(Allentown)則實現了復興和繁榮。

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.

不過，城市衰落最著名的例子是底特律。自1950年以來，這座城市失去了超過100萬人口以及數十萬個工作崗位。市中心大量房產依然空置，它們佇立在那裏，靜默地見證了這座城市的衰敗，並讓每一個從更繁榮的城市來到這裏的旅客驚歎：爲什麼在這麼短的時間裏，就發生了這麼多糟糕的事。殺死底特律的不僅僅是經濟——日企在汽車製造業的崛起——還有市政府的腐敗，以及白人和黑人中產階級從市中心遷往郊區。週六早上在底特律市中心的東部市場(Eastern Market)走一走，顏色和氣味都沒有這裏的喧鬧讓人印象深刻。因爲底特律市中心荒蕪的街道常常就像是靜謐的小村莊一樣。聽起來不像是一座城市。

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.

如果在倫敦工作的歐洲人才因爲怕自身受到排擠或者因爲經濟前景黯淡而逃離，那麼倫敦就會陷入困境。過去10年成爲科技企業聚集地、由倉庫改造的房子如今價格高企的肖爾迪奇區(Shoreditch)再過一個十年可能重新變得“貧窮但性感”。

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，倫敦發生人才逃離的可能性不大。德勤(Deloitte)年初發布了一項分析結果：倫敦擁有170萬高技能人才。得益於科技業的發展，這類人才僅在過去3年中就增加了23.5萬人。倫敦的高技能工作崗位比紐約多55萬。許多高技能人才來自海外。每3個倫敦人就有一個是在海外出生的，每10個倫敦人裏就有1個來自歐盟其他國家。

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.

在倫敦四處看看就會發現：這座城市擁有着充沛的活力。年輕、精力旺盛、數量比巴黎、法蘭克福和阿姆斯特丹三個城市加起來還多的人口推動着這座城市運轉。但是倫敦不能自滿。如果1年流失3萬名高技術移民，只需嚴格控制移民10年，倫敦的高技能人口就會因爲英國退歐而大幅減少。如果失去那些無法通過積分制移民體制的人，倫敦會怎樣呢：比如來自歐洲經濟區(EEA)其他地方的8.8萬名建築工人、7.8萬名餐飲服務業從業人員，以及5.7萬名行政人員？在一個依靠創新、知識和文化驅動的經濟中，金錢是隨着人才走的。倫敦必須不計一切代價留住人才。

An inward turn

向內轉

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.

另一種前景稍微沒那麼可怕，那就是倫敦可能會回到過去：從一個國際化的大都市，再次變回一個英國的城市。英國退歐可能會導致倫敦再度“本國化”。

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.

倫敦可能會迴歸其在上世紀50年代扮演的角色，當時倫敦舉辦了“英國節”(Festival of Britain)，將這個國家的其他地方介紹給當代世界，當時該市芬斯伯裏區的健康中心展現了關於英國的一個構想，即建立一種全國上下都能認同的國家醫療服務體系(NHS)。現在倫敦終歸還是大多數英國機構的所在地：大英博物館(British Museum)、大英圖書館(British Library)、英國廣播公司(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.”

英國投票退歐意在抑制倫敦，縮小其和英國其他地區間日益擴大的差距。其他地區從此或許可以重新獲得它們的首都，迫使倫敦與英國其他地區共享繁榮。工作機會不再只流向歐洲大陸，還會流向斯托克城(Stoke)和桑德蘭(Sunderland)。倫敦可能會發展得更慢，但或許這並不是一件壞事，就如建築評論家羅恩•穆爾(Rowan Moore)在有關倫敦(London)的著作《慢火城市》(Slow Burn City)中寫道：“理想的情況是城市會慢慢的燃燒。它們的社會生態和物理形態應該通過變化而得到更新，而不是被變化摧毀。”

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.

對倫敦來說，休眠幾年真的那麼糟糕麼？物價更合理，定位更英國化，會讓倫敦煥發新生。

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.

在從國際大都市重新國家化的城市中，薩洛尼卡(Salonica)的例子最具悲劇色彩也最驚人。這座極其多元化的奧斯曼(Ottoman)城市在1430年到1912年間由穆斯林統治。在這座城市裏，猶太實業家、土耳其軍官、希臘商人、保加利亞貿易商等各色人比鄰而居，薩洛尼卡的擦鞋童需要掌握八、九種語言。薩洛尼卡曾經是一座多元信仰的城市，直到20世紀初，在戰爭、經濟蕭條、民族主義和意識形態的共同作用下，這座城市遭到了種族清洗。到1950年，這座城市的名字變成了塞薩洛尼基(Thessaloniki)，城中95%的人口都是希臘人，幾乎全部都是基督徒。

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.

倫敦不會遭遇那樣的命運，但它正受制於一種認爲應該更多着眼於國家認同的政治觀點。就如泰勒•布魯勒(Tyler Brûlé)在英國《金融時報》中撰文指出的，對於倫敦的未來，一個略微不同的模型是蒙特利爾(Montreal)。上世紀80年代，作爲加拿大法語區魁北克省最大的城市，蒙特利爾藉着給予法語人羣更大平等的名義，疏遠了說英語的國際商業界——不過那個時候商業已經在向多倫多遷移了。批評者說，這樣的結果是讓蒙特利爾成爲了一個憂鬱的城市，縱使其有很多迷人的老街，但是那裏的房屋和商店都被木板封上了。捍衛者則說，蒙特利爾滿意於自己的境況，它是跨文化創新之鄉，太陽馬戲團(Cirque du Soleil)就是代表，它還忙於推動本土社會創新。

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

當然，“再國家化”需要前提，那就是要有個渾然一體的英國，這樣倫敦才能夠代表英國。這同樣一點都不能確定。