With the precise prescience of a true Master of the Universe, Walter Wriston recently declared that “the 800 telephone number and the/ piece of plastic have made time and space obsolete.” Wriston ought to know. As former CEO of the suggestively named Citicorp, he’s a true Baron Haussmann for the electronic age, plowing the boulevards of capital through the pliant matrix of the global economy.
作为真正的“宇宙主宰者”，沃尔特·里斯顿以惊人的先见之明宣称：“800 电话和那张塑料卡片已让时间与空间变得无关紧要。”里斯顿自然深谙此道。这位前花旗集团（名称颇具暗示性）首席执行官，堪称电子时代的奥斯曼男爵，在全球经济柔韧的肌理中犁出资本的林荫大道。

This comparison isn’t meant to be flip: Wriston’s remark begs fundamental questions about urbanity. Computers, credit cards, phones, faxes, and other instruments of instant artificial adjacency are rapidly eviscerating historic politics of propinquity, the very cement of the city. Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of a wholly new kind of city, a city without a place attached to it.
这个类比并非轻率：里斯顿的论断直指城市性的根本问题。计算机、信用卡、电话、传真等即时人工连接工具，正迅速瓦解基于地理邻近性的传统政治生态——这正是城市的黏合剂。事实上，近年来已出现一种全新的城市形态，一种与具体地点脱钩的城市。

This ageographical city is particularly advanced in the United States. It’s visible in clumps of skyscrapers rising from well-wired fields next to the Interstate; in huge shopping malls, anchored by their national-chain department stores, and surrounded by swarms of cars; in hermetically sealed atrium hotels cloned from coast to coast; in uniform “historic” gentrifications and festive markets; in the disaggregated sprawl of endless new suburbs without cities; and in the antenna bristle of a hundred million rooftops from Secaucus to Simi Valley, in the clouds of satellite dishes pointed at the same geosynchronous blip, all sucking Arsenio and the A-Team out of the ether.
这种无地域特征的城市在美国尤为发达。其标志性景象包括：从紧邻州际公路、电缆密布的田野中拔地而起的摩天楼群；以全国连锁百货商店为核心、被汽车海洋环绕的大型购物中心；从东海岸到西海岸批量复制的全封闭式中庭酒店；千篇一律的“历史风貌”绅士化改造与节日市集；无中心城市依托、无限蔓延的郊区碎片；以及从锡考克斯到西米谷地，百万屋顶天线林立，卫星接收器齐刷刷对准同步轨道上的同一个光点，从以太中汲取着阿瑟尼奥秀和天龙特攻队的信号。

In fact, the structure of this city is a lot like television. TV’s main event is the cut, the elision between broadcast bits, the seam-
实际上，这类城市的结构与电视极为相似。电视的核心在于剪辑——广播片段间的省略与接缝
less slide from soap opera to docudrama to a word from our sponsor.
从肥皂剧到纪实剧再到赞助商广告的无缝滑动。
“The “design” of television is all about erasing differences among these bits, about asserting equal value for all the elements in the net, so that any of the infinite combinations that the broadcast day produces can make “sense.” The new city likewise eradicates genuine particularity in favor of a continuous urban field, a conceptual grid of boundless reach. It’s a process of erasure much noted. In the 1950 s and 1960 s, the alarm was sounded over “urban sprawl” -and “Megalopolis,” the spread of an uninterrupted zone of urbanization along the American Northeast coast, a city become region. More recently, attention has focused on the explosion of so-called “suburban cities” on the fringes of existing metropolises. In this) vast, virtually undifferentiated territory-stretching from Fairfax County, Virginia, to Orange County, California-homes, offices, factories, and shopping malls float in a culturing medium, a “non–” place urban realm” that provides the bare functions of a city, while doing away with the vital, not quite disciplined formal and social mix that gives cities life.
电视的“设计”旨在消除这些片段间的差异，赋予网络中所有元素同等价值，使得广播日产生的任何无限组合都能“言之成理”。新型城市同样抹去了真正的独特性，取而代之的是一个连续的都市场域，一个无边无际的概念网格。这一抹除过程备受关注。20 世纪 50 至 60 年代，人们曾对“城市蔓延”和“大都市带”——美国东北海岸连绵不断的城市化区域，即城市演变为区域——发出警告。近年来，焦点转向了现有大都市边缘所谓“郊区城市”的爆发式增长。在这片广袤且几乎无差别的疆域——从弗吉尼亚州的费尔法克斯县延伸至加利福尼亚州的橙县——住宅、办公楼、工厂和购物中心漂浮在一种培育介质中，形成一种“非场所都市领域”，仅提供城市的基本功能，却摒弃了赋予城市生命力的、尚未完全规训的形式与社会混合体。

The city described in this book, though, is not simply a phenomenon of extent. Its growth no longer merely physical-a matter of egregious densities or metastasizing reach-the new city also occupies a vast, unseen, conceptual space. This invisible Cyburbia-so aptly evoked by Wriston-takes form as necessary, sprouting like sudden mushrooms at capital’s promiscuous nodes. What’s missing in this city is not a matter of any particular building $\}$$\}$}\} or place; it’s the spaces in between, the connections that make sense of forms.
然而，本书所描述的城市并不仅仅是一种规模现象。它的增长不再仅仅是物理层面的——表现为惊人的密度或蔓延的范围——这座新兴城市还占据着一个广阔、无形且概念化的空间。这个由 Wriston 巧妙描绘的“无形赛博城”应需而生，如同突然在资本肆意交汇的节点上冒出的蘑菇。这座城市缺失的并非某一具体建筑 $\}$$\}$}\} 或场所，而是那些连接形式、赋予意义的空间与关联。

The history of cities is embedded in the ways their elements are juxtaposed, the structures of art and regulation that govern urban amalgamation. Questions both of what goes with what and what yields to what are at the basis of urban form-making. Traditional cities have adjudicated such questions via relations to central places. Whether agora, castle, piazza, or downtown, the idea of a city of centers stands, at a minimum, for the idea of a spatial city, a city in which order is a function of proximity. This physical city has historically mapped social relations with a profound clarity, imprinting in its shapes and places vast information about status and order. Whether “the other side of the tracks” in a small town, the New England commons, or the bar-graph of real estate values
城市的历史深植于其元素的并置方式，以及支配城市融合的艺术与规制结构之中。关于何物与何物相配、何物又让位于何物的抉择，构成了城市形态塑造的基础。传统城市通过中心场所的关系来裁决这些问题。无论是集市广场、城堡、广场还是市中心，中心城市的理念至少代表着一种空间城市的构想，其中秩序是邻近性的函数。这座物质城市在历史上以惊人的清晰度映射了社会关系，其形态与场所烙印着关于地位与秩序的大量信息。无论是小镇“铁轨的另一侧”、新英格兰的公共用地，还是房地产价值的柱状图。
visible in the Manhattan skyline, social order has long been legible in urban form. In the new, recombinant city, however, the legibility ${}^{-}$${}^{-}$^(-){ }^{-} of these orders has been dramatically manipulated, often completely obscured. Here, anything seems to go with anything-hierarchies are both reinforced and concealed, at once fixed and despatialized. Value is still a function of location, but the invisible, hand has learned a new geometry. As phone and modem render $\downarrow$$\downarrow$darr\downarrow the street irrelevant, other dimensions become preeminent. Main Street is now the space between airports, the fiber-optic cables linking the fax machines of the multinational corporations’ farflung offices, an invisible worldwide skein of economic relations. Liberated from its centers and its edges by advances in commu-t nication and mobility and by a new world order bent on a single citizenship of consumption, the new city threatens an unimagined $/$$/$/// sameness even as it multiplies the illusory choices of the TV system.
在曼哈顿的天际线中清晰可见，社会秩序长期以来在城市形态中一目了然。然而，在这座新型的、重组后的城市里，这些秩序的清晰度被极大地操控，甚至常常被完全遮蔽。在这里，任何事物似乎都能与任何事物共存——等级制度既被强化又被隐藏，既固定不变又去空间化。价值依然是位置的函数，但那只无形的手已掌握了一种新的几何学。随着电话和调制解调器使街道变得无关紧要，其他维度开始占据主导地位。如今的主街是机场之间的空间，是连接跨国公司分散各地办公室传真机的光纤电缆，是一张隐形的全球经济关系网。得益于通讯和流动性的进步，以及一个致力于单一消费公民身份的新世界秩序，这座新城摆脱了中心与边缘的束缚，却在电视系统虚幻选择的倍增中，威胁着一种难以想象的雷同。

Three salient characteristics mark this city. The first is the dissipation of all stable relations to local physical and cultural geography, the loosening of ties to any specific space. Clobalized capital, electronic means of production, and uniform mass culture abhor the intimate, undisciplined differentiation of traditional cities. The new city replaces the anomaly and delight of such places with a universal particular, a generic urbanism inflected only by appliqué f Here, locality is efficiently acknowledged by the inclusion of the croque-monsieur at the McDonald’s on the Boul’ Miche or the Cajun Martini at the airport lounge in New Orleans (and you’re welcome to keep the glass). This “place” is fully ageographic: it can be inserted equally in an open field or in the heart of town; the inward-looking atrium hotel is as apt to the featureless greensward as it is to teeming unreclaimed downtowns. With its components reduced to a repetitive minimum, space is departicularized. Obsessed with the point of production and the point of sale, the new city is little more than a swarm of urban bits jettisoning a physical view of the whole, sacrificing the idea of the city as the . site of community and human connection.
这座城市有三个显著特征。首先是与当地自然及人文地理的一切稳定关联均被消解，与任何特定空间的联系变得松散。全球化资本、电子化生产方式与同质化大众文化排斥传统城市那种亲密无间的、无序的差异性。新城以某种普遍的特殊性取代了这些地方的异常与欢愉，这种普适的城市主义仅通过装饰性元素稍作变化——比如在巴黎圣米歇尔大道的麦当劳里供应法式三明治，或是在新奥尔良机场休息室提供卡真风味马提尼（玻璃杯还能带走留念）。这类"场所"全然与地理无关：它既能轻易嵌入空旷原野，也可安插在城镇中心；那内向型的中庭酒店既适合毫无特色的绿茵地，也适配于杂乱无章的未改造旧城区。当空间要素被精简至重复的最小单元，地域特性便不复存在。这种新城痴迷于生产节点与销售终端，本质上不过是一簇抛弃整体物质景观的城市碎片，牺牲了城市作为...... 社区与人文连接的场所。

A second characteristic of this new city is its obsession with “security,” with rising levels of manipulation and surveillance over its citizenry and with a proliferation of new modes of segregation. $\}$$\}$}\} The methods are both technological and physical. The former con-
这座新兴城市的第二个特征是对“安全”的痴迷，表现为对市民日益增强的操控与监控，以及新型隔离模式的激增。 $\}$$\}$}\} 其手段兼具技术性与物理性。前者涉——
sist of invasive policing technologies-domesticated versions of the “electronic battlefield”-and a growing multitude of daily connections to the computer grid, ranging from encounters with the automated teller to the full-blown regulatory environment of the electronic workplace. The physical means are equally varied: parallel, middle-class suburban cities growing on the fringes of old centers abandoned to the poor; enclaved communities for the rich; gentrification; the globe-girdling cocoon that envelops the business traveler as he or she encounters the same airport, hotel, and office building from Denver to Dubai; the lacework of overhead and underground circulation systems imposed in Minneapolis or Edmonton to permit shoppers and office workers to circulate in climate-regulated security through threatening urban territory. This impulse to a new urban segregation seems ubiquitous: throughout America, city planning has largely ceased its historic role as the integrator of communities in favor of managing selective development and enforcing distinction.
由侵入性警务技术——“电子战场”的本土化版本——以及日益增多的与计算机网络的日常连接构成，从自动取款机的接触到电子工作场所全面监管环境的形成。物质手段同样多样：在旧中心边缘兴起的平行中产阶级郊区城市，被遗弃给穷人；为富人设立的封闭社区；绅士化；环绕全球的茧状环境，让商务旅行者从丹佛到迪拜都能遇到相同的机场、酒店和办公楼；在明尼阿波利斯或埃德蒙顿铺设的空中和地下交通网络，使购物者和上班族能够在气候调节的安全环境中穿越充满威胁的城市区域。这种新型城市隔离的冲动似乎无处不在：在整个美国，城市规划已基本放弃了其作为社区整合者的历史角色，转而倾向于选择性开发并强化区隔。

Finally, this new realm is a city of simulations, television city, the city as theme park. This is nowhere more visible than in its architecture, in buildings that rely for their authority on images drawn from history, from a spuriously appropriated past that substitutes for a more exigent and examined present. In most American cities, the “historic” has become the only complicit official urban value. The result is that the preservation of the physical remnants of the historical city has superseded attention to the human ecologies that produced and inhabit them. Today, the profession of urban design is almost wholly preoccupied with reproduction, with the creation of urbane disguises. Whether in its master incarnation at the ersatz Main Street of Disneyland, in the phony historic festivity of a Rouse marketplace, or the gentrified architecture of the “reborn” Lower East Side, this elaborate apparatus is at pains to assert its ties to the kind of city life it is in the process of obliterating.
最终，这个新领域是一座模拟之城，电视城，作为主题公园的城市。这一点在其建筑中最为明显，那些建筑依赖从历史中汲取的影像来确立其权威，这种虚假挪用的过去替代了一个更为紧迫且需审视的当下。在大多数美国城市，“历史性”已成为唯一共谋的官方城市价值。结果是，对历史城市物质遗迹的保护，已超越了对创造并居住其中的人类生态的关注。如今，城市设计这一职业几乎完全专注于复制，专注于创造都市化的伪装。无论是在迪士尼乐园仿制主街的极致体现，在劳斯市场虚假的历史庆典中，还是在“重生”下东区的高档化建筑里，这一精心设计的装置都在竭力宣称它与正在被抹去的那种城市生活的联系。

Here is urban renewal with a sinister twist, an architecture of deception which, in its happy-face familiarity, constantly distances itself from the most fundamental realities. The architecture of this city is almost purely semiotic, playing the game of grafted signification, theme-park building. Whether it represents generic historicity or generic modernity, such design is based in the same calculus as advertising, the idea of pure imageability, oblivious to
这是一种带有险恶意味的城市更新，其欺骗性建筑通过笑脸般熟悉的表象，不断疏离于最基本的现实。这座城市的建筑几乎纯粹是符号学的，玩弄着嫁接意义的游戏，如同主题公园的建造。无论它代表的是泛泛的历史性还是泛泛的现代性，此类设计都基于与广告相同的算计——纯粹的可意象性理念，全然无视
the real needs and traditions of those who inhabit it. Welcome to Cyburbia.
居住者真实的需求与传统。欢迎来到赛博郊区。

This book is not an attempt to theorize this new city but to describe it. The sites discussed are representative; they do not simply typify the course of American urbanism but are likely to be models for urban development throughout the world. The frame of reference is thus limited: it is not about Soweto, the South Bronx, or Dhaka. Nor is it directly about Urbino, Paris, or Savannah, those pleasant centers of traditional urbanity. And yet it is. The danger in this new city is in its antithesis: in Victor Hugo’s famous phrase, “This will destroy that.” The new city has the power simply not only to bypass the traditional scenes of urbanity but to co-opt them, to relegate them to mere intersections on a global grid for which time and space are indeed obsolete.
本书并非试图对这种新型城市进行理论化，而是旨在描述它。所讨论的地点具有代表性；它们不仅典型地体现了美国城市化的进程，而且很可能成为全球城市发展的典范。因此，参考框架是有限的：它不涉及索韦托、南布朗克斯或达卡，也不直接涉及乌尔比诺、巴黎或萨凡纳这些传统城市文明的宜人中心。然而，它又确实与之相关。这种新型城市的危险在于它的对立面：用维克多·雨果的名言来说，“这将摧毁那”。新型城市的力量不仅在于能够绕过传统的城市文明场景，还能够吸纳它们，将它们贬低为全球网格上的单纯交叉点，在这个网格中，时间和空间确实已经过时。
“City air makes people free,” goes a medieval maxim. The cautionary essays collected here describe an ill wind blowing through our cities, an atmosphere that has the potential to irretrievably alter the character of cities as the preeminent sites of democracy and pleasure. The familiar spaces of traditional cities, the streets and squares, courtyards and parks, are our great scenes of the civic, visible and accessible, our binding agents. By describing the alternative, this book pleads for a return to a more authentic urbanity, a city based on physical proximity and free movement and a sense that the city is our best expression of a desire for collectivity. As spatiality ebbs, so does intimacy. The privatized city of bits is a lie, simulating its connections, obliterating the power of its citizens either to act alone or to act together.
“城市的空气使人自由，”这是一句中世纪格言。本书收录的警示性文章描述了一股席卷我们城市的歪风，这种氛围可能会不可逆转地改变城市作为民主与欢乐首要场所的特性。传统城市中熟悉的街道广场、庭院公园等公共空间，是我们共享的、可见且可达的伟大公民舞台，也是凝聚社会的纽带。通过描绘另一种可能，本书呼吁回归更真实的都市生活——一座建立在物理邻近性、自由流动基础上的城市，并坚信城市是我们对集体渴望的最佳表达。随着空间性的消退，亲密感也在流失。碎片化的私有化城市是个谎言，它模拟连接，却消解了市民独行或共治的力量。

This is the meaning of the theme park, the place that embodies it all, the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulations without end. The theme park presents its happy regulated vision of pleasure-all those artfully hoodwinking forms-as a substitute for the democratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work. In the “public” spaces of the theme park or the shopping mall, speech itself is restricted: there are no demonstrations in Disneyland. The effort to reclaim the city is the struggle of democracy itself.
这就是主题公园的意义所在，它是这一切的化身——无地域性、监控与管制、无止境的模拟。主题公园以精心设计的欺骗形式，呈现其快乐受控的愉悦愿景，以此替代民主的公共领域，并通过剥离困扰都市的刺痛——穷人的存在、犯罪、污秽与劳作——来迷人地实现这一点。在主题公园或购物中心的“公共”空间里，言论本身受到限制：迪士尼乐园里没有示威游行。夺回城市的努力，本身就是民主的斗争。