Surveys
SURVEY: CITIES
调查：城市
A cul-de-sac of poverty
贫困的困境
May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition
Successful cities need economic growth
城市兴旺需要经济增长
Alamy
阿拉米（法）
THE English men and women who fled their farms and villages in the late 18th century to seek a better life in the factories of burgeoning Manchester, Leeds and Bradford found no streets paved with gold. Rather, they encountered disease, malnutrition and often brutality. In his book “The City”, Joel Kotkin cites the West Indian slave-holder who, on a visit to Bradford, could not believe that anyone could “be so cruel as to require a child of nine to work 12½ hours a day.” Yet by 1850, says Mr Kotkin, this time quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, there was in Britain “at every step...something to make the tourist's heart leap.” Social activists and enlightened professionals had brought about legislative reforms; and the benefits of mechanisation, plus wages pushed up by trade unions, had enabled the poor to start buying the sort of cheap goods they were helping to make. Cities now seemed almost heroic. Can today's urban poor expect to see a similar transformation?
18世纪末，英国乡下人纷纷背井离乡，来到曼彻斯特、利兹和布拉德福的新兴工厂以寻求优越生活。却发现街道并非以黄金铺成，更糟糕的他们是遭遇了疾病、营养不良和经常性虐待。乔尔•科特金在其书《全球城市史》中引用了西印度群岛的奴隶主拜访布莱德福时的情节，面对“雇主规定九岁儿童每日工作十二个半小时的残酷行为”，奴隶主目瞪口呆。书中所描述的1850年则是引用了亚历克西斯•德•托克维尔的话，在英国“游客每走一步….都会看到揪心的事物。”社会激进分子和进步阶层促动了立法改革，与此同时，机械化的便利以及工会推动工资改革，使得穷人开始有能力购买那些自身参与制造的便宜货物，此时的城市可谓英雄辈出。而今日都市的贫穷是否能够预见到一个相同的转变呢？
In many places, such as India, says Eduardo Lopez-Moreno, head of the UN's Global Urban Observatory, new migrants to the towns are no better off than they were in the country. And in poorer nations generally the proportion of urban poor is actually increasing faster than the rate of urbanisation. But the hope that keeps poor people in cities is not always vain. Asia shows that even a region in which 40% of the inhabitants already live in cities, and which is urbanising almost as fast as Africa, is not condemned to misery for ever.
联合国全球城市观测站主持埃东多•洛佩兹•莫雷诺认为，在诸如印度的很多地方，新移入城市居民的生活状况与其在乡村时的境况相比，并未有明显改善。通常在更穷困的国家，城市贫穷人口比例实际增速快于城市化进程。但城市穷人所怀的希望也并非总是徒然。亚洲区域人口城市化比例已达四成，进程几乎与非洲同速，再不会因穷困而受到指责。
In the early 1970s over half of Asians were poor; they could expect to live, on average, to an age of only 48 years; and two-fifths of adults were illiterate. Today the proportion of poor people is about a quarter, life expectancy has risen to 69 years, and about 70% can read and write. That does not mean that everyone has benefited. Far from it: Asia still accounts for two-thirds of the world's poor, of whom 250m are in cities. But even the urban poor of South Asia, who have been largely by-passed by the growth that has lifted East Asia, have reason to hope for better times.
上世纪七十年代初期，超过半数的亚洲人处于贫穷状态。其平均寿命仅为48岁，且五分之二的成年人是文盲。而目前贫穷人口比例约为四分之一，平均寿命升至69岁，并且大概有70％的人能够读写。但这并不意味所有人均受益，且事实远非如此：亚洲仍占有世界三分之二的贫穷人口，其中两亿五千万属城市居民。但受近邻东亚的经济增长实力提高的鼓舞，生活在贫困中的南亚的城市人口有理由满怀希望自己的生活状况得到改善。
Not much of it is coming the way it did in the 19th century, though. It is true that activists and donors are beginning to take an interest in cities, and ideas are now circulating about upgrading slums and attacking urban poverty. Some of these concern the problems of illegal squatting, which are now well known. With no title to your shack you have no incentive to improve it, no way to insure it, no collateral with which to secure a loan, no address with which to become an official citizen, let alone to open a bank account: you are locked in poverty. Yet there is money in slums, and enterprise—and numbers.
但南亚并未沿着十九世纪的“老路”继续向前。激进分子和捐款人开始对城市发展产生兴趣，并逐步开始考虑改善贫民窟、消除城市贫困，其中一些人关注目前惹人眼球的非法定居问题。的非法定居问题。未被赋予合法居住权，违法居住者就会缺乏奋斗的动力，没有安全保证，没有担保信贷，无法成为正式市民，更不用说开设银行帐户：他们将无法逃脱贫穷的命运。而分布在贫民区、企业等地方的资金却闲置，未能得到充分利用。
Getting it together 整合
Many ideas to unlock the enterprise turn on using the numbers. This can be done, say, by encouraging a majority of the local residents to form a savings group or a co-operative and ask the municipality to grant collective development rights, some of which may be used in the slum and some sold off. Other community groups, under a suitable leader, may be able to negotiate with a commercial lender and then hire a project manager to oversee the rehousing of several people. Or a group of co-ops may hire a financial intermediary.
许多意欲让企业卸下包袱的观点就是将目光放在民间资源方面。即鼓励多数地方居民构成节约储蓄机构或合作社，同时要求市政当局准予集体发展权，一些权益会将会给贫民区，另一些将会被出售。由合适领导者带领的其它社会团体，可与商业贷款方磋商，同时雇用项目经理统筹居民新宅供给。合作社组织还可选择与金融中介协作。
A more top-down approach is to ask governments to issue land certificates indicating a range of personal rights rather than strict title deeds. This has worked well on a small scale in a dozen African countries. Vietnam has successfully brought in the concept of private leasehold. Other schemes involve a donor accepting the responsibility of upgrading a slum in return for a sovereign debt.
更加严密有效方法是要求政府出台土地证书，标明个人权利范围，而非绝对严格的所有权证书。该方法在一些非洲国家小范围作用显著。越南已成功引入私人批租概念。其他的计划中，包括让捐款人以承担消除城市贫困的责任来替代主权债务。
All these ideas have their merits and should be copied more widely. But the main conclusion to be drawn from the success stories is that few poor people in cities will grow richer if their local economy is not growing, and few local economies will prosper if the national economy is not also prospering. Cities often play a disproportionate role in the national economy. Mumbai accounts for 40% of India's tax revenues, for example; Tokyo accounts for a third of Japan's GDP; and over three-quarters of Senegal's industrial production comes from around Dakar. In absolute terms, too, cities can be huge wealth creators. Seoul's economy equalled the whole of Argentina's in the late 1990s, and Mexico City's equalled that of Thailand.
所有计划各自都具优势并值得广泛效仿。但是从成功范例中得出的主要结论就是，如果区域经济停滞不前，那么城市中的贫困人口就很难富起来，同样，如果国家经济不能兴旺繁荣的话，那么区域经济也必定同病相怜。举例来讲，孟买的税款占到印度税收总额的四成；东京为整个日本国民生产总值贡献三分之一；塞内加尔近四分之三的工业制成品来自达喀尔。按绝对价值来计算，城市也是巨大的财富创造者。单首尔经济总值就与九十年代末整个阿根廷持平，而同时期，墨西哥城与泰国总水平不相上下。
This is not to say that all cities will prosper in step with each other, or with the nation as a whole. In both rich and poor countries, some cities may flourish as others decline. Several metropolitan areas in America's Great Lakes region—never mind the cities at their heart, such as Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh—have long been losing inhabitants, their population is ageing and income growth has lagged behind rivals in other parts of the country.
这并非是说所有城市将齐头并进，或总体与国家一致。无论穷国富国，其某些城市会随着其他城市的衰败而繁荣。美国五大湖地区几个大城市区域，尽管拥有诸如布法罗、克里夫兰、匹兹堡等重镇，长期以来仍不断的流失居民，人口逐步老龄化且收入增长滞后于国家其他地区城市。
Even Mumbai's economy, successful though it seems, has been growing less fast than the economies of such places as Bengalooru (Bangalore), Chennai and Hyderabad. Indeed, in 2003 Mumbai's growth rate was behind Maharashtra's, which was behind India's. Sanjay Ubale, the state official in charge of co-ordinating all the plans to develop the city, says that $10 billion of public and private money is being spent on infrastructure projects. That will be welcome, but surely not enough if Mumbai is to realise its ambition to overtake Hong Kong and Singapore as a financial centre, and to become a “world-class city”.
甚至表面看来兴旺繁荣的孟买，其经济增长却落后于本加卢鲁（原班加罗尔）、金奈与海得拉巴等地。实际上，2003年孟买经济增长率落后于马哈拉施特拉邦总体水平，而马哈拉施特拉邦又落后于印度整体水平。据印度城市发展计划协调负责人Sanjay Ubale先生称，有100亿的公众和私人资金用于基础设施项目。这虽然受到欢迎，但仍不足以实现孟买赶超香港和新加坡，成为世界金融中心和世界级城市的雄心壮志。
In some respects cities compete with each other, even across borders. Fierce competition now takes place within India to win, say, a new BMW plant or a Nokia special economic zone. Similarly, Hong Kong and Shanghai vie to call themselves China's financial capital, just as New York and London vie for the world title. The busiest stock exchange may mean the lion's share of the market in financial services, and the jobs that go with it.
一些有关城市间相互竞争，甚至超越了国境。印度国内各地竞相激烈竞争新的宝马生产车间或是诺基亚特别经济区。与此相同，香港与上海争相称自己乃“中国金融首都”，而纽约和伦敦也在为世界金融中心的名誉而激烈竞争。极其繁忙的证券交易意味着拥有金融服务最大的市场份额，由此就业量也随之上升。
In general, though, one city's success does not mean another's failure. Only when they are competing for finite resources or a specific prize, an investment or the Olympic games, say, does one city stand to gain at another's expense. Most cities must therefore hope that they can benefit from a sound national economic policy. Even in an expanding economy, the benefits of growth do not always trickle down to the slums very fast. That is why other policies are needed, too. But in places where growth has been negative, notably Africa, it is well nigh impossible to eradicate slums. Even so, life for the urban poor can be improved.
但总之，一个城市的兴旺并非意味另一个城市的衰落。只有当彼此间争夺有限资源或特别奖励，争夺投资项目或奥林匹克举办权时，城市间的获益才会此消彼长，因此大多数城市还是希望能够从坚强有力的国家经济政策中获利。同时，甚至在经济扩张下，贫民区也不并总能立即享受到发展的成果，此时就需要借助其他政策工具。在负增长地区，如较为显著的非洲，根除贫民区遥不可及，但即使如此，城市贫穷人口的生活依然能够做出改善。
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