The world goes to town 《The Economist》Fri, May 11, 2007
当世界充斥城市…
After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human history
will ever more emphatically become urban history, says John Grimond.
过了今年之后，大多数的人们都将住在城市里头。经济学人编辑，约翰．格里蒙德说
：“人类历史会更着重在城市这一部分。”
Whether you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known
as Eden, or more prosaically on the savannahs of present-day east Africa, it is
clear that Homo sapiens did not start life as an urban creature. Man’s habitat
at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and foraging
were rural pursuits. Not until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years
ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village, and by that
time man had been around for about 120,000 years. It took another six millennia,
to the days of classical antiquity, for cities of more than 100,000 people to
develop. Even in 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. Some-
time in the next few months, though, that proportion will pass the 50% mark, if
it has not done so already. Wisely or not, Homo sapiens has become Homo urbanus.
你所认为的人类历史，无论是源起于美索不达尼雅的伊甸园，或者是枯燥乏味的东非
莽原上，智人都并非是始于城市的生物，这实在是再明白不过了。最初人类的住所是受限
于找寻食物的需求，而狩猎和采集则是对农业的追求手段。直到上一次的冰河期末尾，大
约是一万一千年前，人类才真的开始有所谓的“村庄”建筑，离人类繁衍之初已有十二万
年之久。莫约又过了六千年的时间，也就是古典文明时代，才有超过十万人的城市出现。
甚至到了西元一千八百年，世界人口才仅有3%居住在城市里。然而再过几个月后，这个
比例就会突破50%的指标，即使现在尚未来到。不论明智与否，智人这名词早就变成“城市
人”了。
In terms of human history this may seem a welcome development. It would be
contentious to say that nothing of consequence has ever come out of the
countryside. The wheel was presumably a rural invention. Even city-dwellers
need bread as well as circuses. And if Dr Johnson and Shelley were right to say
that poets are the true legislators of mankind, then all those hills and lakes
and other rural delights must be given credit for inspiring them.
以人类的历史观点看来，这也许是个可喜的发展。不过若说没有什么成就起于穷乡僻
壤的话，那可得引发不小的争议了。像轮子就被推测是农业上的一项发明。即便是住在城
市的人，生活中仍会需要面包及马戏表演。如果英国诗人强森和雪莉所述的恰如其分：
“诗辞是人类真正的立法者”，那么所有乡野间动人的湖光山色，必然成为他们灵感来源
的一大保证。
But the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the
urban one. Cities’ development is synonymous with human development. The first
villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of
animals: people no longer had to wander as they hunted and gathered but could
instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills
and all to live in greater safety from predators. After a while the farmers
could produce surpluses, at least in good times, and the various products of
the villagers—grain, meat, cloth, pots—could be exchanged. Around 2000BC metal
tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for quantities of
grain placed in granaries. Not coincidentally, cities began to take shape at
about the same time.
但是和都市比起来，农村对人类进步的贡献似乎是少了许多。城市的发展与人类文明
的进程是相与并进的。最初的农村起源于农业发展及畜养动物，使得人们不再需要漫游于
四方打猎与采集，而是群居安顿于一地；这使得一些特殊技能得以发展，同时亦可避免食
肉动物的袭击而更加安全。过不久后，农人开始生产多余的存粮，至少在较好的时节是如
此，各式各样的农村物资也开始交易，像是谷物、肉类、布疋和陶罐一类的。约西元两千
年前，金属代币(硬币的前身)开始在农业地区成为换取谷物的收受额。说巧不巧的是，城
市也在同一时间开始成形。
They did so, first, in the Fertile Crescent, the sweep of productive land
that ran through Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, from which Jericho, Ur,
Nineveh and Babylon would emerge. In time came other cities in other places:
Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus valley, Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, Yin
and Shang cities in China, Mycenae in Greece, Knossos in Crete, Ugarit in Syria
and, most spectacularly, Rome, the first great metropolis, which boasted, at its
zenith in the third century AD, a population of more than one million people.
首先兴起的是肥沃月弯，这片横跨了伊拉克、叙利亚、约旦和巴勒斯坦的丰饶大地，
她的子民相继建立了耶利哥、乌珥、尼尼微和巴比伦这些城市。紧接着其他地区也开始有
了发展，诸如印度河谷的哈拉巴和摩罕吉达罗、埃及的孟斐斯和底比斯、中国的殷商城邦
群、希腊的麦锡尼、克里特的克诺索斯、叙利亚的乌加列，以及最引人注目的罗马─
─史上第一个首善之都，以其西元三世纪的黄金时期闻名于世，拥有超过一百万的人口。