金融時報:小城市的大夢想

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2021年11月24日

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小城市的大夢想

你是否厭倦了大都會昂貴、繁忙、喧鬧的生活，渴望回到生活更輕松的中小城市？你不是一個人。研究表明，世界上的大城市已經(jīng)漸漸失去了吸引力，未來，中小城市的增長將超越曾經(jīng)不可一世的大都會。

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

swish [sw??] 發(fā)出嗖嗖聲

demise [d?'ma?z] 死亡,讓位

undermine [??nd?'ma?n] 暗中損害, 逐漸削弱

humming ['h?m??] 嗡嗡叫

counterintuitive [ka?nt?r?n'tju??t?v] 違反直覺的

stimulating ['st?mjule?t??] 令人興奮的

Why small cities can generate big ideas（797 words）

By Simon Kuper

In 1990 I moved to East Berlin. I'd rented a room around the corner, as I now know, from the research physicist Angela Merkel. The flat had no phone, so to make calls I had to walk 10 minutes to a phone booth in West Berlin. Later, I got a flat in the west with a shared toilet on the communal staircase and no shower. I soon learnt the codes of Berlin student conversation: “Where do you live? Do you have a shower? Maybe I could come round and shower at yours one day?”

Very little survives of that Berlin. Today it's a swish metropolitan area of five million inhabitants, almost all of whom have in-house toilets. More people arrive every day to start tech companies or the vegetarian restaurants that service them. Berlin exemplifies the transformation of the rich world's big cities this past quarter century. But that era may now be ending. London, New York and Tokyo have become not just overcrowded and overpriced, but also overstimulating. The star of the next 25 years could be the smaller city.

I'll be careful here, because people have been announcing the demise of the megacity for a while now. It hasn't happened yet. For each person who left London aged 32 whining that the place had become unliveable, there were always approximately 1.1 newcomers bidding for the vacant bedroom.

However, if you keep raising the price of a thing, eventually customers start looking elsewhere. Big cities remain perfect places for older people to consume their wealth, but not for younger people to generate it. The academics Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires crunched the latest US census data and found that native-born Americans are leaving big cities and “moving to smaller places with between 500,000 and a million people”. The favourite destinations are cheap, pleasant college towns near large airports, such as Provo, Utah, home of Brigham Young University — which is situated in “the best metro area for jobs in 2017”. The area's median home price has surged but is still only $258,000.

These trends are international. Provo's European equivalents are towns such as Bristol, Bordeaux and Luxembourg. Meanwhile, megacities across the rich world seem to have peaked. New York City's government expects its population growth to slow from 16.6 per cent in the 1980-2010 period to 9.5 per cent from 2010 to 2040. The London Assembly's planning committee has warned that the city is running out of space for newcomers. Offices for start-ups already cost more in London than anywhere else on earth. Tokyo — the world's biggest city, with 38 million inhabitants — is forecast to start shrinking from 2020. Morgan Stanley predicts that China's smaller cities will grow much quicker than the country's first-tier cities up to 2030. Globally, the cities projected to expand fastest are small and medium-sized, says Nature magazine.

This is largely because the biggest places have become victims of their own success. Alien and unaffordable to most people, they are now objects of jealousy in their own country. Britain's vote for Brexit will undermine booming cosmopolitan London. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is hunting down the undocumented immigrant cleaners, dishwashers and nannies who keep American megacities humming.

Terrorism, too, hurts big cities. It's not that the inhabitants are fleeing in fear. The morning after an attack, the buses are packed again. But precautions against terrorism disrupt city life: the delays when someone forgets their shopping on the Tube, the searches before you enter entertainment venues, the need to register a fortnight in advance if you want to attend any remotely sensitive event.

Then there's a new, counterintuitive downside to big cities: they may actually have become too stimulating. From the 1980s, argues the urbanist Richard Florida, people in creative industries moved to big cities partly in order to meet each other. New York's former mayor Michael Bloomberg argued: “A city that wants to attract creators must offer a fertile breeding ground for new ideas and innovations.”

Each new coffee shop was its own little breeding ground. But the ecosystem worked so well that it got out of hand. The Berlin of 1990-91 was still pretty quiet: I spent a winter month mostly in bed, wearing a Russian soldier's bear hat against the cold, only getting up to shove more coal into the oven. Today's Berlin never sleeps. It's so packed with creative venues, events and people — each of them armed with an overstimulating smartphone — that hardly anyone has the headspace to think any more.

I went to Berlin last month for a typically multinational ideas exchange organised by Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The star speaker, Stanford philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, argued that the best place to have or develop ideas is the small town. It has to be a big enough place to run into smart people but quiet enough to allow you to escape back inside your own mind. Gumbrecht cited Socrates' Athens, Renaissance Florence and today's Stanford University as examples. Provo might be next.

請根據(jù)你所讀到的文章內(nèi)容，完成以下自測題目：

1.Which of the following is not a problem facing big cities today？

A.Precautions against terrorist attack are disturbing.

B.The cost of living has risen beyond acceptable levels.

C.Life in big cities are busy and overstimulating.

D.Crowded big cities leave no space for creative venues.

答案(1)

2.Joel Kotkin and Michael Shires find out that native-born Americans today prefer to live in ____.

A.smaller places with population under ten thousand.

B.small towns where the home price is relatively low and stable.

C.small and pleasant college towns near large airports.

D.second-tier cities with college and international airport.