The 22nd-Century City
The 22nd-Century City
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22世纪的城市
DOI：
10.1068/b3906ed
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Batty M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Batty M
十年前的2002年夏天，我驱车从南京经苏州前往上海，行程约250公里。当时我震惊于这样一个事实：我们经历了几乎连续不断的城市发展，农村正在变成一种新型的城市——Terry McGee（1989）曾经创造了“desakota”这个词——城镇和乡村的混合体，一种可能是中国本土的城市扩张，但这一事实表明，到本世纪末，几乎每个人都将生活在一种或另一种城市中（Batty, 2011）。在写这篇文章的时候，我刚刚沿着原路返回，但这一次只是从苏州到上海。尽管如此，我记得2002年的苏州是一个大约有100万人口的城镇，但仍然是一个围绕运河建造的村庄——这是长江三角洲地区——让人想起旧中国。在这中间的几年里，我觉得苏州的人口已经达到了200万到300万（Xie et al ., 2007），但我被非常肯定地告知，苏州现在有1100万人口，而且还在上升。再加上上海市2300万的人口，上海的人口已经超过了目前世界排名第一的任何一个大城市，比如墨西哥城或东京，据说大约有2500万到3000万人口。我的旅程经历了一个引人注目的城市扩张，它更多的是一系列相邻的、相互联系的高层建筑群，与美国扩张的典型例子凤凰城或亚特兰大的任何地方都大不相同。从很多意义上说，这当然是中国未来的城市，就像我们在西欧以低得多的密度和很少的高层建筑不断发展的城市一样，是我们（至少是我）的未来。伦敦的人口并不比阿姆斯特丹的100万多800万。更大的伦敦地区至少有1500万人口，可能更接近2500万，而在荷兰，几乎不可能为近1700万人口划定城市边界，无论如何，这些人口都跨越边境进入比利时。在一个我们都将生活在城市的时代，定义城市规模将是一个完全有问题的问题，因为它已经在世界上许多地方出现了。这对于一些看似持久的城市发展特征，如我们的城市规模缩放定律，意味着什么尚不清楚。如果我可以将像伦敦这样的城市定义为800万、1500万或2500万，那么我们就可以以这样一种方式操纵排名规模曲线，即它不再对城市层次结构的组织有任何意义（Cristelli et al, 2012）。当我们都生活在城市里时，当然仍然会有明显的等级制度，因为这是城市之间竞争的标志，事实上，城市之间的竞争似乎变得更加激烈。但多年来，我们一直用物质形态来定义城市，而这已经不再是衡量城市本质的标准。如果苏州到上海的高铁需要40分钟，那么上海和苏州在哪里结束呢？如果你看一下过去2500年里人口排名前50的城市，苏州比其他任何城市都更长久（2150年），尽管就目前的人口排名而言，它在150多年前就离开了前50名。显然，它现在已经回来了，但事实是，它没有得到这样的承认，只是承认目前的排名与正在发生的事情无关。这也等于承认，我们再也无法确定城市的边界了。我现在可以画出一个“合理的”界限，很容易把上海-苏州放在排名的顶端，把伦敦放在前20名，但是还有很多……
Ten years ago in the summer of 2002, I was driven from Nanjing to Shanghai through Suzhou, a distance of about 250 km. I was struck then by the fact that we journeyed through almost continuous urban development where the countryside was turning into a new kind of city—‘desakota’as Terry McGee (1989) once coined the term—a mixture of town and country, an urban sprawl indigenous perhaps to China itself but symptomatic of the fact that by the end of this century, nearly everyone will be living in one kind of city or another (Batty, 2011). At the time of writing I have just retraced my steps but this time simply travelling from Suzhou to Shanghai. Nevertheless, I remember Suzhou in 2002 as a town of perhaps 1 million but still enough of a village built around canals in its core—this is the Yangtze delta region—reminiscent of the old China. In the intervening years, it seemed to me that Suzhou had reached 2–3 million (Xie et al, 2007) but I was told quite firmly that Suzhou is now 11 million and rising. Simply add that to the Shanghai municipality population of 23 million and you already have more people living there than in any of the large city agglomerations that are currently ranked number 1 in the world such as Mexico City or Tokyo which are said to be about 25–30 million. My journey was through a remarkable urban sprawl which was more a series of adjacent and linked clusters of high-rise development all running into one another, rather different from anything that resembles Phoenix or Atlanta, the archetypical examples of sprawl in America. This in many senses of course is the Chinese city of the future just as the continuous urban development that we have in Western Europe at much lower densities and with very little high rise, is our (at least my) future. London is no more 8 million people than Amsterdam is 1 million. The wider London region is at least 15 million, probably nearer 25 million while in the Netherlands, it is simply impossible to draw city boundaries for a population of nearly 17 million which in any case spreads across the border into Belgium. In an age when we will all live in cities, defining city size will be entirely problematic as it has already become in many parts of the world. What this means for some of the seemingly long-lasting signatures of urban development such as our city-size scaling laws is unclear. If I can define a city like London as 8 or 15 or 25 million, then we can manipulate the rank-size curve in such a way that it no longer has any meaning with respect the organisation of the hierarchy of cities (Cristelli et al, 2012). When we are all living in cities, there will of course still be a distinct hierarchy because this is the signature of the competition between cities which in fact appears to be becoming even more intense. But physical form is what we have used for many years to define the city and this is no longer the measure of what a city actually is. If it takes 40 minutes on the bullet train from Suzhou to Shanghai, then where does Shanghai end and Suzhou begin? If you look at the top-50 cities in terms of the rank of their population over the last 2500 years, it is Suzhou that has been in the top rank for more years (2150) than any other city, although in terms of the current population rankings, it left the top 50 over 150 years ago. Clearly it has now returned but the fact that it is not recognised as such is simply an admission that the current ranks bear no relation to what is happening on the ground. It is an admission too that we can no longer define city boundaries with any certainty. I can now draw ‘plausible’boundaries that would easily put the Shanghai-Suzhou at the top of the hierarchy and London in the top 20 but there are many …