Gated communities are only the most recent incarnation of the narrow-eyed suspicion with which we view unleashed strangers venturing outside on foot, much less anywhere near our homes 总是狭隘地怀疑陌生人在试图闯入,其中封闭的社区是最典型的代表
This kind of attitude seems uniquely American. When I lived in Vienna, where walking and public transport are more common than driving, I got used to transporting myself by train and foot, both around town and in the hiking trails of the Alps. In Russia, where I spent stretches of my teens and twenties, walking is a way of life, schoolchildren racing and dour old men trudging around cities and villages in biting sub-zero winters. When I moved back to the US, I never got reaccustomed to the lack of public transport and sidewalks, the assumption that destinations even half a mile away – a 10-minute walk – required a motor vehicle and a seat belt. The car, the distrust of walkers, they’ve become the hallmarks of an everybody-for-herself, bootstrap-pulling, falsely self-sufficient American culture. Freedom to drive when and how we please is as American as apple pie and a gun holster; freedom to walk is not. 这种态度似乎仅美国人才有。我住在维也纳时,那里步行和公共交通比开车更常见。我习惯自己坐火车或者步行,包括在城里转悠,或去爬阿尔卑斯山。在俄罗斯,我度过自己十多岁和二十多岁的地方,步行是一种生活方式,在痛苦的严寒的冬天,学童们会赛跑,沉默的老年人会在城里和乡下慢慢散步。当我搬回美国时,再也不能重新适应那种缺少公共交通和人行道的生活,假设即使半英里的路程,仅需要走路10分钟,人们也需要汽车和安全带。汽车,对行人的不信任,开始变成一种自私自利而又错误地自我满足的美国文化的标签。任何时间以任何喜欢的方式驾驶是一种自由,就像美国人的苹果派和手枪皮套那样,但步行不是。 In many parts of the US, pedestrianism is seen as a dubiously counter-culture activity. Gated communities are only the most recent incarnation of the narrow-eyed suspicion with which we view unleashed strangers venturing outside on foot, much less anywhere near our homes. A friend of mine told me recently that a few years ago, when she lived in Mississippi, she was stopped by police constantly simply because she preferred to walk to work. Twice they insisted on driving her home, ‘so I could prove I wasn’t homeless or a prostitute. Because who else would be out walking?’ She finally got tired of the hassle and bought a used bike to commute. 在美国大多数地方,步行主义会被视为令人怀疑的反文化行为。人们总是狭隘地怀疑陌生人在试图闯入自己家,其中封闭的社区是最典型的代表。一个朋友告诉我,就在前些年,她住在密西西比时,经常会被警察拦住,就因为她更喜欢走路去上班。有两次警察坚持开车送她回家,“因此我必须证明我不是无家可归或一个妓女。不然还会有谁在外走路呢?”最终她厌烦了辩解,然后买了一辆二手自行车开始上下班。 Our world has changed drastically from the age of antiquity, or even Wordsworth and Thoreau, those acclaimed walker-thinkers, if we’ve reached the point where, in a supposedly post-feminist world, a woman breaking no law can be harassed by the police for the simple act of walking to work. 从古老的世纪,或者甚至华兹华斯和梭罗——那些受赞扬的步行思考者的时代,我们的世界已经戏剧性地改变了。如果我们已经到达某个时间点,例如一个后女权主义的世界,一个女士会经常因为简单地喜欢走路上班而违法、而困扰。 I’d theorise that America’s distrust of the unprotected pedestrian – the No Trespassing signs, the gated communities, the suburban homes with no sidewalks – goes further back, tapping into instincts built long before suburbs and motorways, before human record. Our bipedal ancestors evolved in a paradigm of moving between shelter, which meant protection, to leaving it and searching for food at enormous physical risk. When a carnivore inevitably showed up they had no hard-sided Land Rover to retreat into. From evolution’s perspective, danger came in tandem with walking, manifesting in later centuries as laws against loitering and assumptions that a woman walking alone must be a prostitute. 我想系统阐述美国如何不信任不受保护的行人,“禁止擅入”标志、封闭的社区、没有人行道的郊区房子——甚至更远,人类有记录之前、郊区和高速公路出现以前的原始建筑。我们直立的祖先的进化模式是,在意味着保护的遮蔽物间来回移动,然后离开房子冒着生命危险去觅食。当一个食肉动物突然出现时,他们没有硬朗的路虎可以帮忙撤退。而从进化的观点来看,危险总是和步行并行的,这证明在数个世纪后,法律会反对流浪,而“一个走路的女人一定就是妓女”的假设也是成立的。 Walking opens us up to the menace of a world outside the built environments that we control. Driving, despite the high risk of crashes, injury, and death, masks itself as freedom: we’re not watching our backs. And once we’ve become unaccustomed to the movement of the air, the rustle of the trees, the sight of other people, they can startle. eople who move differently and think differently from us become, from the safety of our fortress-homes and echo-chamber media and car-conduits that feed it all, threats to our way of life. And so we design towns and suburbs, neighbourhoods and cities, unfriendly to the walker, to those who break out of the paradigms we’ve deemed safe. We do this willingly, even though the personal loss of walking ability is so terrifying that ‘Will I ever walk again?’ is a reliable trope of television’s medical dramas. 步行,将人们暴露于人为环境之外的世界的危险之中。开车,自认为是自由的,除了高风险的撞车、受伤和死亡外:因为我们不必关注自我。当一旦人们已经变得不习惯空气流动(风)、树叶沙沙作响、他人的目光,他们会吓一跳。届时,那些和人们思考、行动不一样,不曾享受堡垒似的家、立体式多媒体和汽车管道的人,会威胁到人们的生活方式。因此人们将城镇郊区、城市社区设计得令行人、令那些打破了常规的人不适应。我们自愿这样做,哪怕丧失个人走路的能力,哪怕恐怖地就像电视医疗剧里的典型台词,“我还能再走路吗?” Much of the world, thankfully, is unlike the US in this respect. But for how long? America has already exported nutrition-light junk food across the globe, along with its attendant obesity and diabetes epidemics. Why not our aversion to getting places on foot? Oligarchs and politicians in Russia started importing their own flavour of gated communities years ago, usually complete with a guardhouse and guns, and the country’s middle class often aspires to the same. The Ramblers in Britain has faced resistance to its use of ancient footpaths and its advocacy for the ‘right to roam’ since the organisation’s inception in 1935. As American approaches to economic policies and social programmes, as well as the craving for elbow-room and large, single-family homes, worm their way into the European psyche, how, too, will the urban and rural landscapes change to reflect Americans’ hurried and sedentary lifestyles? What will we lose of ourselves in the process? 然而幸运的是,世界上大多数地方,在这方面不像美国。但是还有多久呢?美国已经向全世界输出了没有营养的垃圾食品,以及伴随而来的肥胖、糖尿病。为什么不让人们讨厌步行呢?数年前,俄罗斯的寡头政治执政者和政客们开始“进口”符合他们口味的封闭式社区,通常伴有警卫室和枪,然后国家的中产阶级们也经常渴望同样的。英国的漫步者已经面临对古老的步行通道、始于1935年的组织的漫步倡议的反对。作为解决经济政治和社会问题的美国式途径,包括对自由活动场所、大住宅的渴望,正逐渐渗透欧洲文化核心,然后,城市和乡村会怎样改变以体现美国式匆忙而不变的生活方式?而我们自己会在其中失去什么呢? In January 2013 the journalist and National Geographic fellow aul Salopek undertook a seven-year journey on foot, from Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. Called Out of Eden Walk, his trek was structured to follow, literally, in the footsteps of Homo sapiens, those few thousand human beings who ventured out from Africa more than 100,000 years ago to spread their genetic material around the globe. His reasons for walking? To ‘relearn the contours of our planet at the human pace of three miles an hour . . . I hope to repair certain important connections burned through by artificial speed, by inattentiveness.’ 2013年1月,记者、国际地理会员保罗·萨洛佩科开始了一项为期七年的行走,从埃塞俄比亚的东非大裂谷到智利的火地岛。这叫做“走在伊甸园外”的活动,不夸张地说,他会有计划地跟随智人——超过十万年前,数量不过数千的他们从非洲开始向外冒险,向全世界传播了人类基因——的脚步。他行走的理由呢?为了“通过1小时3英里的人类速度,重新感受我们星球的轮廓……我希望通过笨拙的方式,重新修补那些因人造速度而损失的重要的联系。” Even Los Angeles is trying to shuck its longstanding identity as an auto-dystopia through investment in public transport and public spaces 甚至洛杉矶也在试图通过投资公共交通和公众场所以洗掉自己长期以来糟糕的形象 Salopek started his journey because we are losing our ability and our right to walk, but I fear he started it too late. Those of us who walk are finding the paths slipping out from under our feet. What will we become without the means to walk, the desire, the space, the capability? Are we headed, as Daniel E Lieberman asks, ‘to a future like the one described in the movie WALL-E in which we balloon into a race of fat, chronically ill weaklings who are dependent on medications, machines, and big corporations to survive?’ If so, it will be a future we created willingly, with our complaints that walking is too much work, too boring, too weird. The other day I saw a pickup truck with a bumper sticker proclaiming, ‘My other car is a couch!!!’ a prospect so exciting it warranted three exclamation marks. 萨洛佩科因为我们正在丧失步行的权利而开始自己的旅途,但是我害怕他开始得太晚了。那些步行者发现人行道正从脚下逐步逝去。失去步行的方式、欲望、空间和能力,人们会变成什么样?我们正在走向一个,正如丹尼尔·E·里尔波曼问的,“去往一个就像电影《机器人总动员》描绘的那样,人们成为一群受肥胖、慢性病折磨,只能依靠医药、器械和大公司才能生存的世界?”如果这样,那也是我们自愿创造的世界,因为我们总抱怨走路太辛苦、太无聊、太奇怪。有一天我看见一辆小货车贴着保险杠贴纸,上面写着“我的另一辆车是一个沙发!!!”,这带着三个感叹号的贴纸太有意思了。(因为车变得就像沙发,懒惰、变胖的象征)。
Walkability has attracted more positive attention over the past few years, partly because of tragedies like Raquel Nelson’s, but thanks more to the clout of younger, well-off white citizens. These younger generations prefer walking or biking to car ownership, making ‘walk scores’ valuable commodities for real estate. A slow trickle of walkability initiatives is digging grooves in America’s car culture, starting in the cities. In 2014 New York City launched Vision Zero, a programme started in Sweden, that aims to make the roads safer for all users, one of its principles being that human health and life take precedence over mobility. Seattle is experimenting with turning some neighbourhoods into Dutch-style woonerfs, street spaces that all users share equally. Even Los Angeles is trying to shuck its longstanding identity as an auto-dystopia through investment in public transport and public spaces. 过去几年里,舒适步行已经得到更多积极的关注,一部分是因为拉克尔·尼尔森样的悲剧,但是更感谢许多年轻人、富有的白人的影响。这些年轻的一代人,相比汽车,更喜欢走路或骑自行车,这让“步行得分”也成为衡量房地产价值的有效因素。从城市开始,舒适行走的涓涓细流正在美国汽车文化里积极积累。2014年,纽约启动了零伤亡活动,这是一个起源于瑞典的活动,旨在使马路对所有使用者都安全,其中一个观点就是,“人类的健康和生命比移动更重要”。西雅图正在试验,试图将一些社区变成荷兰式的庭院式道路(乌纳夫),以让每个人都能平等地使用街道。甚至洛杉矶也在试图通过投资公共交通和公众场所以洗掉自己长期以来糟糕的形象 And when America Walks announced the launch of its Walking College, which will train people in community-level walking advocacy, they received 80 applications for 20 spots, even though the fellows would have to pay for their training themselves. The irony of a Walking College is not lost on Kate Kraft. ‘It’s impressive, considering evolution,’ she says of America Walks’s work. ‘Something so simple and so fundamental to being human requiring so much intentional energy.’ Will it be enough? I look at stories like Raquel Nelson’s and think the future might look less like WALL-E – in which human beings are at least happy, well cared-for, and oblivious to their condition – and more like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, where those with means will live in enormous, deceptively serene compounds of cleanliness and innovation, and those without will be left in the decaying cities to get around however they can. 当美国步行协会宣布启动步行学院(学院将培训提倡社区步行)时,他们在20个地点收到80封申请,即使这些人都需要自费培训。凯特·克拉夫特并不觉得这是种讽刺,“这是令人印象深刻的、值得深思的进步”。她提到美国步行协会的工作说:“一些对人类如此基础简单的事情竟需要如此多刻意的精力。”这样就够了吗?我读着拉克尔·尼尔森的故事,觉得未来可能不太会像《机器人总动员》——在那里人类至少会快乐、衣食无忧、乐不思蜀——而更像玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《羚羊和秧鸡》:有钱人会生活在一个巨大的虚假的平静的清洁和创新的混合物中,剩下的人只能尽己所能地游荡在腐蚀的城市里。 Until then, open your door; go for a walk. Feel the spring in your step, the buoyancy in your spine, the loose-limbed gait, as more than clichés. Take one last, lingering moment to appreciate this miraculous thing before we lose it forever. 在那之前,打开门,出去走走。感觉你脚下的溪流、放松的脊椎和四肢随意的步伐,或类似的。至少一次,久久徘徊,以在我们永远失去之间好好珍惜。
[ 本帖最后由 南卓 于 2015-8-29 19:24 编辑 ] |