中國進入后城市時代？對規(guī)劃者的挑戰(zhàn)

約翰·弗里德曼【美】 沈 璐 譯

Introduction

I imagine that many of you here today are surprised by the first part of the title for my talk∶ “Is China moving into a post-urban era?” All around us we see nothing that couldn’t be called urban, from sky scrapers to airports to high-speed rail networks.Moreover, I have to confess that I am not completely certain that even this term—posturban—conveys the absolute novelty of what I perceive to be happening, and not only in China but to some extent on every continent.Collectively, humanity is creating a new type of human habitat which, although its origins are what we still understand to be the classical city—in my case, say, the Vienna where I was born 87 years ago—a city that could still be viewed as a whole from a given vantage point. The urban habitat has grown and physically expanded to such gigantic dimensions that the only way to see it as a single entity is when it is mapped in twodimensional space or from a satellite high above the Earth. For you who are here today,the image of what I’m calling the classical city may well be some other place altogether,perhaps Republican-era Chengdu. The point,however, is that the dimensions of the urban today far exceed those of past ages and present us with unprecedented challenges,which, if we are completely honest, we don’t really know how to respond to. A group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has an ongoing research program under Professor Neil Brenner on what they call “planetary urbanization” where they investigate not only the densely populated parts of our planet but also the reach of the urban into its most distant, extreme outposts∶ the two arctic regions, the Gobi desert, the Sahara, the Himalayas, and even the stratosphere.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee believed that history can be told as a story of challenge and response. While this is surely not the whole story, Toynbee’s theory of history is appealing to me as a planner,precisely because it emphasizes a response that can be creative, and every creative action is already a new beginning. We don’t often completely succeed in the urban projects we imagine, but even failures can be instructive. At its best, planning is a process of continuous social learning.

Social learning takes place when we begin to understand the true nature and extent of the challenges before us. Part of the problem, here, is to find an appropriate conceptual language that will afford us insight into the new phenomena that challenge us to engage with new ways of thinking and acting. That is why I have chosen the term“post-urban,” just as we speak of post-Fordist or post-modern eras. All these formulations suggest a transition from a point in the past to a not yet clearly articulated future. The urban is all around us but, compared to older ways of thinking about cities—cities we could still criss-cross from one end to the other on a morning’s walk—its multiple meanings are different. Although the concept of posturban still subsumes the familiar “urban,” it also points beyond it in ways that I will try to explain in the course of my talk. In what follows, I will therefore employ a conceptual language that, for the most part, will be new to you∶ I’ll be pouring new wine into new bottles, not the old, when I use terms such as“urban super-organism” , the “periurban,” the“fusion of urban horizons,”“self-organizing systems,” and the “no?sphere or sphere of the mind,” access to which creates a “public sphere.”

My talk is organized into three parts,each part posing a question. First, what exactly do I mean by a post-urban era?Second, what are the unique characteristics of an urban super-organism? And third,what are the major challenges that call for planners’ creative response to the posturban, particularly in China?

What do I mean by “post-urban”?

At the time of the founding of the People ’s Republic, China’s level of urbanization was on the order of 10 percent;the remaining 90 percent lived in the countryside and worked primarily as farmers,and what they produced was mainly for selfconsumption. Sixty years later, China’s urban population, now roughly estimated at 650 million, has already passed the 50 percent mark, while Chinese farmers, now greatly diminished in numbers, actually produce a surplus that for the most part is now consumed in the new urban areas. Clearly,the country is on the way to becoming completely urban. But these hundreds of millions of urbanites are not distributed evenly across the vast distances of China.The eastern provinces, for example, are more urban than the western, and so on.Moreover, the criterion of who is counted as urban is an administrative one, the hukou registration card, rather than a sociological,cultural, or some other criterion. But surely there are other ways of becoming urban,such as by adopting certain ways of living or engaging in non-farm work. By a more ample criterion such as these terms suggest,some regions, such as the Yangtze Delta,are already completely urbanized. And so you could ask me∶ what do you mean when you speak of a post-urban era? What comes after the urban? And how does this help us to understand what is actually happening.

Let me begin with a formal definition. By a “post-urban” era I have in mind a period of transition during which many single-centered urban regions are gradually absorbed by and incorporated into a polycentric urban system that extends over a relatively compact,densely populated area and is home to multiple millions, as many as upwards of 50 million or more. Such a region can no longer be called a city in any conventional sense;it is an unprecedented form of the human habitat.

Initially, each urban center within such a system was surrounded by periurban zones that themselves were under pressure to urbanize, as the central city extended outwards into surrounding spaces,transforming what were once rural villages into what some called suburban, that is,wholly urbanized places in the outskirts of large cities. At the same time, any agricultural production remaining in the interstices of rapidly urbanizing periurban zones tends to become increasingly commercialized,capital-intensive, and in effect industrialized.To speak succinctly, in the vicinity of urban centers even farming is evolving into an urban type activity. And because of the relatively short time-distances among the major urban centers of a polycentric region,neighboring periurban areas begin to interpenetrate, forming a continuous urban skein. I refer to this process as a fusion of urban horizons.

The periurban is a seemingly chaotic,post-urban landscape of mixed uses that, as a whole, are relatively unplanned. Villages are urbanized in situ but are nevertheless connected to an infrastructural grid that crosses the landscape and links local centers to each other and the world. Being for the most part transacted electronically, these linkages are all but invisible, while other links appear to the eye as vehicular flows of trucks and automobiles. And as dense networks of high-speed transport and communication are constructed, the space-time distances of such a vast new “assemblage” of the urban shrink and enable it to function as a single urban system cutting across multiple jurisdictions. Such an assemblage is no longer what we conventionally understand as a city, even though, like a city, it behaves in many respects as a single socio-economic spatial entity.

The existence of such an entity was discovered as early as 1961 by the French geographer, Jean Gottmann, when he identified the eastern seaboard in the United States as a continuously urbanized area which he named megalopolis. Gottmann,however, pointed to it as only a spatial phenomenon, although he did understand this pluricentered linear system to function in some ways as a single urban system of some 700 km in length. Today’s population of Gottmann’s megalopolis in the eastern United States is estimated to be around 50 million.

Today, a number of such “post-urban”systems can be found in western Europe,North America, Brazil, and of course Asia.To distinguish them from Gottmann’s construct and rethink them from a planning perspective, I will speak of them as Urban Super-Organisms (or USOs)—a term originally borrowed from evolutionary biology.USOs stand for a distinctive form of the human habitat. In China, the most evolved USOs include the Yangtze River Delta from Nanjing to Shanghai, including Hangzhou and Ningbo, and the Pearl River Delta extending from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and across to Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai.Elsewhere in Asia, one could perhaps also point to the Tokaido USO extending from Tokyo to Osaka and incipient USOs in South Korea (Seoul), northwestern Java (Jakarta metro-region), and India, for example the emerging post-urban region centered on Mumbai, as well as many other USOs in the making.

I avoid attaching population figures to these “post-urban” regions because the numbers depend on how one precisely delimits them and whether one counts the so-called temporary population of migrant workers and their families as part of the system or not. This is a matter for future research. As far as concerns the two Chinese regions I have mentioned, we can argue that whatever the numbers turn out to be, they will almost certainly continue to increase over the next 20 years, the goal of the new government in Beijing being to urbanize another 350 million rural people. The Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas will thus become a great deal more densely populated by any measure of settlement, including continued in-migration from less urbanized parts in China, natural demographic increase,new communication and transportation infrastructures, and, above all, the changeover from a predominantly export to a more domestically-oriented market economy. The effect of this last source of densification is that it is likely to lead to a much thicker network of inter-industry relations along with a huge expansion of related business services.

①See Nikos A. Salingaros,“ Development of the Urban Superorganism,” Kataraxis #3 (2004) accessed June 8, 2013 at www.kataraxis3.com/Salingaros-Urban_Superorganism.htmSalingaros teaches in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Texas, San Antonio, Texas, and is closely associated with the work of Christopher Alexander.

What are some characteristics of USOs?

As I mentioned earlier, the new sociospatial phenomenon of an urban superorganism (USO—and let me repeat that I believe Shanghai to be a leading part of one, its “dragon head”—is not merely unprecedented in human history and vastly understudied, but must also be described in ways that depart from traditional urban sociology and geography. I will confine myself to only two observations. The first relates to a new dimension of any USO, which has to be understood not only as a physical artifact in three dimensional space but additionally as a densely patterned, dynamic socio-cultural,economic, and political set of interdependent systems that are constituted of tens of millions of interactive decision-making units,including individuals, households, economic,and political and administrative units that are not necessarily aligned hierarchically but connected in various ways to each other via a fourth dimension of face-to-face and electronically mediated communications and exchanges across different scales. The second characteristic, I will argue, is that any USO is to an extent a self-organizing system. I will now turn to each of these in turn. (A third critical characteristic relates to questions of governance. As USOs evolve,becoming increasingly larger until they finally converge upon a vast pluricentered urban entity by way of a fusion of urban horizons,new forms of governance are required, at different scales, that will lead to new relations of decision-making power. But the topic of governance is so huge that I will not be able to do it justice in this relatively brief,introductory comment).

I begin with communication and exchange. This dimension is made possible by a variety of high-speed and ultra-highspeed technologies that allow almost instantaneous communications among virtually all decision-making units both within the USO and beyond it. On the ground, highspeed trains and relatively uncongested freeways make possible face-to-face encounters within normal commuting timedistances of 20 to 40 minutes. In addition,cyberspace allows access to a vast sphere of virtually unlimited information and connection which, as early as 1922, the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin called the no?sphere or sphere of human thought (from the Greek word nous, here translated as “mind”) or more broadly, the sphere of self-reflective human communication that extends like a silken skein across the planet.

From a planning perspective, this sphere, so promising in some respects of human progress, has nevertheless serious limitations. If we accept that knowledge should serve as a guide to action—which is a basic premise of planning—the sphere of communication and exchange forces decision-making to become more incremental, more focused, more strategic.Contrary to traditional planning rhetoric,knowledge for decision-making is always fragmentary and drawn from mostly(historical) information about the past. But under conditions of rapid change, as is the case of post-urban China, the past must be judged as an imperfect guide—imperfect for a variety of reasons such as out-of-date and incomplete information at the necessary scale, incorrect interpretations of the available information, huge gaps in research,the mistrust of political decision-makers of even “scientific” knowledge, and so on.Instead, decision-makers are tempted to act in spite of the inherently large uncertainties and risks inherent in bold actions, never sure that resulting outcomes will conform to their optimistic expectations. From a holistic perspective, the no?sphere—the sphere of self-reflective thought--may appear chaotic to some, but it is actually helping to give shape to complex new patterns in the material world, as millions of actors incrementally adjust their decisions according to errorcorrecting feedback and other information.Given enough time, however, incremental decision-making has the potential to also become system-transforming though not always in the ways we intend. And when we confront the future as planners, it is the metaphor of social learning that paradoxically reminds us of the limits of even the most expert knowledge.

What I have sketched here is actually the outlines of a partially self-organizing human system that conforms to given parametric constraints that are themselves undergoing constant revision, extensions,and contractions. An urban super-organism can thus be understood as a high-density,four-dimensional spatial system where a change originating at any point tends to ripple through the system, producing unanticipated changes, both small and large,at many other points. A stable equilibrium in such a system is scarcely ever reached,and the system remains in constant motion,as it adapts and transforms itself. There are, of course, laws and customary rules to which systemic change should conform,but these rules serve merely to constrain the existing options actors face in making their decisions; they do not determine them.Likewise, there are enabling infrastructures—water, food systems, electricity, transport,communications—that help to shape the physical form of USOs. And always there are the relentless streams of information originating from both inside and outside the USO that local actors must take into account as they ponder what to do next in the pursuit of their own interests. Much of this information tends to be redundant, nor is it always reliable. Furthermore, for information to be converted into knowledge, it needs to interpret. Unfortunately, to the consternation of many, different interpretations result in different scenarios, so that consensual decision-making is relatively rare, if not impossible, at the macro-scale of USOs.One might even speak here of a surfeit of information, except that we are often unable to distinguish information that is valuable from the dross. In any case, we have to be selective in the information we use. In the end, no one, including at the highest levels of government, has a complete and accurate overview of what, at any given moment, is the actual state of the system or any particular part of it, or has a clear idea in what ways the system as a whole is evolving. Habermas has referred to such a situation as unübersichtlich—i.e., lacking in a clear overview or unintelligible, which he believed to be a characteristic of the modern metropolis.

②Incremental mutual adjustment is typical of all economic transactions in a market economy, for example, See the work of Charles Lindblom for an extensive discussion and its relevance for planning.

And yet, you could argue that the USO“works” in the basic pragmatic sense that life somehow goes on, decisions are made, the trains run on time, the economy produces,technical innovations are adopted for good or ill, housing gets built, and so on. The USO,it turns out, appears to be a fairly resilient system despite occasional disruptions,conflict, and even temporary breakdowns.But it is far from being the efficiency machine some imagine it to be. Self-organization is a socio-spatial process that lacks awareness of itself and remains ignorant of the many side effects it produces. These mostly negative effects can have self-destructive, that is entropic, consequences. I need merely to cite the serious deterioration of environmental quality—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the landscapes we delight in—that is one of the well-known casualties of this process. Ultimately unacceptable inequalities in respect to income, housing, health, and educationare another. If the USO is to become a sustainable human habitat—a habitat for living—conscious interventions are needed to deal with these and other serious inefficiencies.

Obviously, this is where planning comes in, but the powers at the disposal of planners are exceedingly limited, even in China with its unitary, hierarchical administrative system.They address only the three dimensions of land and buildings, rarely (if at all) the fourth dimension of communication, and thus of social, cultural, and political organization.In conclusion, then, I would like to address some questions that are occasioned by my belief that we are moving—and not only in China—towards a largely ungovernable post-urban era in which increasingly selforganizing human habitats of enormous size generate huge inefficiencies and other entropic processes that threaten to undermine whatever hopes we may have for continued human flourishing.

In the post-urban era, what challenges do planners face?

The condition I have called post-urban does not at present extend uniformly across all of China. But it is already visible in the Yangtze Delta where 100 million people are living essentially urban lives in a compact area of about 100,000 square kilometers—a third the size of Italy—divided among 22 major cities. On a day-by-day basis, the Delta is thus a region of great complexity;it is tightly woven together economically,physically, socially, and inevitably politically;and its several periurban areas have in effect become fused or nearly so. Such a region,I have argued, is largely self-organized,though not as efficiently as it might be.That is why I have called it an urban superorganism, a new form of the human habitat.What are some of the challenges for the planners of this region which has played such a strategic role in China’s century-old quest to become modern?

I am not here to give advice to planners whose knowledge of this region is infinitely superior to mine. Rather, I want to point out some challenges that a heavily urbanized region such as the Delta present to planners and how they might respond to them. And so I return to the question of complexity which,given the astronomical lines of interrelation among decision-making units in the Delta,we could call a deep complexity that should be humbling to all of us in our desire to correctly guide its future direction.

Planners lack the instrumentalities to control everything that goes on in such a vast and restless urban landscape that is governed less by man-made laws than by the law of incremental mutual adjustment among millions of actors as they react to perturbations in their environment. One of the early scientists of cybernetics, Ross Ashby, formulated the famous “l(fā)aw of requisite variety” which, when generalized,could be stated as follows∶ “the solution to any problem must be as complex as the problem itself.” When this statement is applied to social issues, being short of requisite variety means that scientific knowledge, including planners’ knowledge,is much too simplistic to adequately address the actual complexities being modeled.Scientific knowledge comes to us in the form of models that, of necessity, are a radical simplification of reality. That is both their beauty and power and may help us explain a given phenomenon. But no model can tell us what to do; it lacks requisite variety. In other words, there can be no “master plan” for the USO of the Yangtze Delta.

As planners, we have far too much faith in models and their seductive simplicity.Intuitively, we have looked for other ways of accessing requisite variety by, for example,involving larger and larger numbers of people in the search for best solutions to what are otherwise intractable problems. Let me mention just three of them.

The first is to share information with the relevant public so that each member of that public is better informed and in a better position to reduce the uncertainty and risk of their own actions. This was the secret of success of French national planners in the post-war period of reconstruction in the late 40s and 50s of the last century, when the central government initiated a form of planning which they called “indicative.” The French indicative plan was about intentions only and concerned chiefly new investments,some to be made by the government itself,others by powerful private agents. The indicative plan, which was a relatively shortrange plan, was widely shared among all players in the game in the course of periodic consultations who, in turn, informed each other about their own intentions during the projected period. Adjustments and agreements followed these consultations,the end result of which was a significant lowering of uncertainties about each other’s intentions.

A second way that sharing information has been done to good effect is through participatory planning. This is particularly important at a time such as the present when quality of life issues are coming to the foreground of public policy, and planning shifts from the large-scale to the more intimate spheres of life worlds embedded in the fine grain of urban neighborhoods. When done well—and careful preparation here is essential—its objective is to draw in active members of local communities to respond with their own ideas about the changes that are needed to improve the quality of life in specific localities. Participatory planning of this sort aims at establishing an open dialogue or two-way communication between government and local residents. In a region of 100 million there are thousands of neighborhoods of various sizes, and local people are the best source of information about what needs to be done to improve the quality of local life. A responsive government will take care to listen to these voices and incorporate them in their overall programming.

The emergence of a no?sphere in China,which I have already mentioned, creates other opportunities for sharing information.We can now engage people wherever they live through hand-held devices, i-phones,micro-messages and the like whose numbers are exploding. Planners have been slow in taking advantage of these new technologies.As in the case of neighborhoods (which is a kind of spatially defined public), multiple publics are increasingly emerging which,though spatially dispersed, are vitally interested in anything that concerns them,whether it is food security, air and noise pollution, ecological footprints, damage to beloved landscapes, housing needs, sports arenas, health issues, corrupt practices…the list is virtually endless. The knowledge of these dispersed, specialized publics can be drawn upon in the same way as in spatially defined neighborhoods∶ their concerns can be listened to, their active participation in planning can be encouraged.

There is an ancient tradition in China for people to petition the government,complaining of injustices or asking the authorities for help. But today’s technology allows us to go far beyond petitioning. Where response times are virtually instantaneous,as they are now, all kinds of information can flow up from people to the government,instead of only trickling down. For instance,there is a tendency in China to hush up disasters, whether of a train wreck or polluting chemicals in a river system, or the burning of a chicken processing plant in which more than a hundred workers perished.This silencing of what should be news (and thus in the larger public domain) no longer works, as information is instantaneously spread through cyber networks across the country. The government’s fear is of losing people’s confidence, but the silencing of disaster news tends to have just the opposite effect. It makes people angry not to be told of what has happened, not to be able to vent their frustration and to be treated like children. Without critical voices, there can be no social learning, which under rapidly changing circumstances is of the essence of good planning.

Allow me to close with some comments on collaborative planning, especially in periurban areas whose horizons are in a process of fusing into a continuous landscape of the urban. Periurban areas in China come under the direct control of prefecture-level central cities, because they are essential to their functioning. It is from periurban zones that fresh food reaches the city; where new industries and other space-consuming projects grab periurban land for their own use; whose watersheds must be protected and ground water reservoirs carefully managed to prevent them from becoming depleted; where open spaces that are essential for the good health of city dwellers must be set aside as recreational parks;where landfills and solid waste disposal facilities are typically located; and where new housing estates are often located. All these requirements must be fitted into what is an already small and continuously shrinking terrestrial space. Because of the close proximity of urban centers to each other, their respective periurban spaces will eventually join up into a single space that must be shared with neighboring centers, even though such sharing may lead to tension.Conflict can be avoided, however, so long as two or more parties agree to collaborate on land use planning issues across jurisdictional boundaries of the periurban. Until the recent present, each urban center saw itself as competing against all other cities for inbound investment and was reluctant to collaborate on common projects. Hopefully, this is now changing, especially in USOs such as the Yangtze Delta, which is increasingly behaving as a single living entity.

I have avoided dealing with the central issue of governance for USOs, a topic that will obviously require a great deal of cooperation across jurisdictional lines, the whole being larger than its parts. There is a substantial literature in the Englishspeaking world on metropolitan and regional governance, but none of this has much to say that would be useful for China’s USOs.Our traditions of governmentality are too different to be of much help for places like the Yangtze Delta region. So I merely want to place a reminder at the end of this long talk that the issue of regional governance will sooner or later have to be resolved before the entropic forces that are continuously at work in this region—particularly with respect to the environment and various forms of growing social inequality—succeed in gaining the upper hand.

1 從“城市化”到“后城市化”

“中國進入后城市化時代？”很多人會質(zhì)疑這個假說。的確，在我們的周圍，所見所聞所感，無一不是城市化的：摩天大樓、機場、高鐵等等。此外，也必須承認，現(xiàn)在還很難確定，“后城市化”這個詞最終會有怎樣的演繹。但可以肯定的是，新時代已經(jīng)到來了，不僅僅在中國，在各大洲的不同地方均有跡可循?？梢哉f，人類正在創(chuàng)造一種新型的棲息地，盡管它的起源仍是我們熟知的“傳統(tǒng)城市”。以奧地利首都維也納為例，大約在一個世紀前，當時人們?nèi)阅軓某俏鞯目▊惐ど缴细╊鞘械娜病５裉?，跟許多大城市一樣，只有從衛(wèi)星影像圖上才能辨識城市的邊界。今天城市的規(guī)模超過了以往任何一個時代，給我們帶來前所未有的挑戰(zhàn)。哈佛設(shè)計研究生院正在進行一項名叫“星球城市化”的研究，研究范圍不僅覆蓋人口密集的區(qū)域，而且把視角伸向我們星球最遙遠的深處：兩極地區(qū)，撒哈拉沙漠，喜馬拉雅山，甚至平流層。

英國歷史學(xué)家阿諾德·湯因比認為，歷史是人類面對挑戰(zhàn)和應(yīng)對挑戰(zhàn)的故事。盡管這個觀點并不全面，湯因比的歷史觀卻揭示了一個這樣的事實：作為規(guī)劃師，響應(yīng)挑戰(zhàn)是創(chuàng)意的體現(xiàn)，每個創(chuàng)造性的行為本身就已經(jīng)是一個新的開始了。并非所有的城市規(guī)劃項目都會獲得成功，但即使是失敗經(jīng)驗也是富有啟示意義的。從這個角度上講，規(guī)劃是一個不斷向社會學(xué)習(xí)的過程。

當人們從理解事物本質(zhì)和應(yīng)對挑戰(zhàn)開始，其實就已經(jīng)開始向社會學(xué)習(xí)了。為了概括上文描述的新挑戰(zhàn)、新思維和新對策，本文選擇了“后”這個術(shù)語表達相應(yīng)的概念，正如此前人們創(chuàng)造的“后福特主義”或者“后現(xiàn)代主義”等語匯一樣，它們都描述的是從過往的一種確定狀態(tài)向未來尚未可知狀態(tài)的過渡。盡管城市無所不在，但與我們以前熟悉的城市相比，現(xiàn)在的城市意義正在變得更加多元。盡管“后城市化”一詞的詞根是“城市”，但要真正理解其含義，不能“舊瓶裝新酒”，而要“新瓶裝新酒”，需要對一些新概念進行詮釋和理解，如“城市超級有機體”、“城市邊緣區(qū)”，“聚合城市”、“自組織體系”和“智域或智慧領(lǐng)域”等，而概括以上這一切的則是“公共領(lǐng)域”。

2 “后城市化”的內(nèi)涵

在新中國成立的時候，全國的城市化水平僅為10%，其余90%的人生活在農(nóng)村，主要從事農(nóng)業(yè)勞動，農(nóng)業(yè)產(chǎn)出大部分用來自我消費。60年后的今天，中國的城鎮(zhèn)人口已達到6 500萬人，城鎮(zhèn)化率超過50%，農(nóng)民的數(shù)量大大削減，減少部分被城市吸納，成為城市勞動力。但問題在于，數(shù)以百萬計的新城鎮(zhèn)化居民并非均衡地分布在中國廣袤的土地上，比如東部沿海省份較西部內(nèi)陸省份吸納了更多的剩余勞動力。此外，現(xiàn)今城鎮(zhèn)人口的統(tǒng)計方式僅憑借戶口控制的行政手段，而忽略了社會、文化等關(guān)鍵因素。因此，除了戶口之外，還因引入生活方式、從事非農(nóng)工作等方法推進城鎮(zhèn)化。長三角地區(qū)已經(jīng)幾乎完全城鎮(zhèn)化了，因此還需要引入新的概念來幫助人們認識城市化之后的情形。

“后城市化”描述了一個城市（群）構(gòu)成過程中的過渡時期，從許多單中心的城市區(qū)域逐漸被吸納到一個多中心的城鎮(zhèn)化體系內(nèi)，后者以相對緊湊、人口密度高為特征，其人口甚至可以達到5 000萬或更多。這樣的城鎮(zhèn)化系統(tǒng)很難用傳統(tǒng)的城市定義加以概括，是一個前所未有的人類棲息、聚集的形式。

每個核心城市最初都是被鄉(xiāng)村包圍著的。這些鄉(xiāng)村地區(qū)時時受到城市化的壓力，這種壓力源自核心城市向周邊擴張的動力，鄉(xiāng)村地區(qū)被改造成所謂的郊區(qū)，是核心城市周邊完全城市化的地區(qū)。與此同時，任何在這些城市化地區(qū)縫隙中殘存的農(nóng)業(yè)生產(chǎn)，都很快吸引到資本投資，引入工業(yè)生產(chǎn)。簡單地說，核心城市周邊的哪怕是農(nóng)場也會最終演變成城市。由于距離和區(qū)位優(yōu)勢，城市周邊的各郊區(qū)組團也開始相互滲透，形成連續(xù)的城市連綿區(qū)，成為“聚合城市”。

城郊看似混亂、功能混雜，并呈現(xiàn)后城市化的城市景觀，整體而言缺乏規(guī)劃的指引。村莊被就地城市化，但其市政基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施仍需要接入核心城市的管網(wǎng)，通過核心城市與其他城市相連，進而與世界相連。電子商務(wù)時代，聯(lián)系方式更加數(shù)據(jù)化了，更加隱形了，但卻更加凸顯交通聯(lián)系的重要性。密集和高速交通網(wǎng)絡(luò)的建成，時空距離的有效縮減，誕生了新的、更加龐大的“城市組合”，并使之像一個城市一樣運轉(zhuǎn)，而不考慮行政邊界的限制。這種城市組合盡管在很多方面形成了獨立的經(jīng)濟社會的空間整體，但我們不能用傳統(tǒng)的城市定義去理解它。

早在1961年，法國地理學(xué)家簡·戈特曼便發(fā)現(xiàn)了美國東部沿海城市連綿的現(xiàn)象，并命名為“大都市帶”。但戈特曼卻認為這只是個空間現(xiàn)象，這個延綿700km長的線形、多中心城市系統(tǒng)會像一個城市一樣運作。如今，在美國東部沿海大都市帶上已經(jīng)集聚了近5 000萬人口。

如今，世界上已經(jīng)有很多這樣的“后城市”系統(tǒng)，如西歐、北美、巴西，當然還有亞洲。為了區(qū)分戈特曼的假說，并對其進行規(guī)劃角度的反思，我將其命名為“城市超級有機體”。這是一個從生物進化學(xué)引入的概念，是一個人類聚居的特殊形式 。在中國最大的兩個城市超級有機體是長三角和珠三角，后者還包括香港和澳門。在亞洲的其他區(qū)域，較成熟的是日本東海道地區(qū)，從東京到大阪；還有尚處于初級階段的首爾、雅加達和孟買大都市區(qū)等。

為盡量避免將人口因素加入“后城市”區(qū)域的定義中來，因為人口的界定總是不精確的，比如是否將所謂的外來務(wù)工人員及其家屬組成的臨時人口計入統(tǒng)計范圍內(nèi)，對未來更精確的研究會產(chǎn)生一定的影響。正如上文中提到的兩個中國大都市區(qū)，不管用何種口徑和方法統(tǒng)計人口，它們的人口都將在未來20年持續(xù)增長，這也是受到了中央政府的新型城鎮(zhèn)化的影響。與此同時，中國正在經(jīng)歷從出口導(dǎo)向向內(nèi)需導(dǎo)向的經(jīng)濟發(fā)展模式轉(zhuǎn)變，在此情況下，城市間的產(chǎn)業(yè)和商貿(mào)聯(lián)系會愈加加強，從而形成更加緊密的城市城際聯(lián)系。

3 “城市超級有機體”的特征

①參見尼科斯A. 薩林加羅斯. 發(fā)展城市超級有機體. Kataraxis2004（3）www.kataraxis3.com/Salingaros-Urban_Superorganism.htm（2013.6.8.）。薩林加羅斯任教于得克薩斯大學(xué)應(yīng)用數(shù)學(xué)系，曾是克里斯托弗·亞歷山大的親密同事。

城市超級有機體（USO）是一個新型的社會空間現(xiàn)象，上海將起到“龍頭”的作用，在人類歷史上尚屬首次，尚處在研究的初級階段，與傳統(tǒng)的城市社會學(xué)與地理學(xué)有著很大的差異。城市超級有機體有兩個主要的特征：一是規(guī)模，不僅是三維的物理空間，而且是人口密度高、社會文化、經(jīng)濟和政治活躍的地方，一般來說是一個千萬級人口組成的相對獨立的體系，包含個人、家庭、經(jīng)濟、政治和行政等單位，形成交互式?jīng)Q策機制。他們不一定形成決策的等級體系，而是通過多種渠道進行溝通，越來越多地通過第四維空間，即以電子信息為媒介，在不同的空間尺度中進行交流和交換。二是自組織的體系，任何一個城市超級有機體都在一定程度上是一個自組織系統(tǒng)。三是“善治”，隨著城市超級有機體的發(fā)展和演化，最終形成一個巨大的多中心的城市，成為一個聚合式的城市。在這樣的情況下，不同尺度上的“善治”就變得很重要了，形成新的決策體系。

隨著技術(shù)的發(fā)展，USO內(nèi)部和外部的交流的時間間隔變得越來越短，各單位在虛擬空間里的決策幾乎是瞬時完成的。除此之外，虛擬空間還提供了無限的信息，以及信息之間相互聯(lián)系的可能性。早在1922年，法國哲學(xué)家德日進就提出了“智域”的概念。這個概念源于希臘語，意思是人類智慧環(huán)境，或者更廣義的理解是信息流如同絲線般纏繞在地球的表面。

盡管“智域”體現(xiàn)了人類進步，但從規(guī)劃的角度來看，仍存在諸多局限性。如果我們將知識作為行動的指導(dǎo)，溝通與交流的圈層使得決策變得更加漸進性、更加聚焦和更具戰(zhàn)略性。與傳統(tǒng)的規(guī)劃思維不同，我們決策所需的知識通常是碎片化的，而且主要源自于過去的信息。但是，在信息快速交換的條件下，比如在“后城市”時代的中國，過去的信息通常無法提供完美的指導(dǎo)，比如在某些必要的層面存在過時的和不完整的信息，有效的信息被錯誤解讀，研究存在巨大鴻溝，政治決策不可信等。決策者通常冒著巨大不確定性的風險而作出大膽的決策，不管其結(jié)果是否達到最優(yōu)的預(yù)期。從整體的視角來看，“智域”實際上能夠幫助在現(xiàn)實世界中塑造更加復(fù)雜的新模式，成千上萬的行動者根據(jù)試錯的反饋信息漸進式地調(diào)整他們的決策。只要時間足夠充分，這種漸進式的決策能夠促成整個系統(tǒng)的轉(zhuǎn)型，盡管可能不會是我們所意想的那樣。對于規(guī)劃師而言，“向社會學(xué)習(xí)”提醒我們，當我們面對未來時，就算是擁有最專業(yè)的知識也是存在局限的。

這里勾勒的實際上僅僅是人類自組織系統(tǒng)的一部分，是符合給定的約束條件的部分，而這些約束條件本身也是在不斷修正、擴展和收縮的。因此，城市超級有機體可視作高密度的四維空間，任何一點上的變化都會在整個系統(tǒng)波及系統(tǒng)的每個部分，產(chǎn)生或大或小的變化，系統(tǒng)幾乎從未達到過平衡，而是一直處于持久的動態(tài)中，不斷去適應(yīng)和轉(zhuǎn)變。

當然，有一些規(guī)則和原則約束上述的轉(zhuǎn)變，然而，規(guī)則只是指導(dǎo)人們?nèi)绾螌ΜF(xiàn)狀問題作出選擇，并不起到?jīng)Q定性作用。同樣，城市超級有機體所需要的基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施，如水、食物、電力、交通、通訊等，人們往往可以從城市超級有機體的外部和內(nèi)部兩方面獲取信息，但仍需要通過目標導(dǎo)向和利益導(dǎo)向來甄別信息的價值。信息往往是多余的，同時也是不可靠的。其次，信息變?yōu)橹R是需要理解的過程。

不幸的是，在很多情況下，不同的愿景條件下對信息的解釋是不同的，因此，在城市超級有機體的宏觀層面上，意見統(tǒng)一的決策結(jié)果一般是很少見的，甚至是不可能的。信息過量會使人們很難分辨信息的價值。無論如何，規(guī)劃師必須有選擇性地使用信息，包括政府最高層在內(nèi)的所有人，對于系統(tǒng)的即時動態(tài)、特別是系統(tǒng)的部分特征，以及系統(tǒng)運轉(zhuǎn)機制等，有一個全面和準確的概念，哈貝馬斯稱之為“迷?！?，也就是說缺乏一個明確的概念，這也是他對現(xiàn)代化大都市特點的普遍認識。

人們可能會認為，一般意義上來看，城市超級有機體還是運轉(zhuǎn)正常的：無論如何生活在繼續(xù)、決策依然可以做出、火車運行準點、經(jīng)濟依舊運轉(zhuǎn)、技術(shù)革新無論好壞依然進行、住宅還是在不斷建設(shè)等等。似乎城市超級有機體是一個彈性很大的系統(tǒng)，盡管它有時也會偶爾出現(xiàn)故障。但事實上，它遠非人們想象中的“高效的機器”。自組織是一個社會空間過程，缺乏對自身的認識，也會忽視其產(chǎn)生的副作用。大多數(shù)的負面影響是有著自我毀滅的嚴重后果的。我只需要舉出自然環(huán)境的例子：我們呼吸的空氣，我們喝的水，我們欣賞的風景，這些都是負面影響的受害者。最終還影響到收入、居住、健康和教育等方面的不平等。如果城市超級有機體要成為可持續(xù)的人類棲息地，就必須對上述提到的（但不限于）非有效部分進行干預(yù)。

顯然，規(guī)劃可以在這方面有很大的作為。但規(guī)劃師的權(quán)利極其有限，即使在中國這個自上而下集中管理式的國家。規(guī)劃師習(xí)慣于三維的思考方式，無論是對土地還是建筑，很少對第四維空間的信息領(lǐng)域進行思索，包括社會、文化和政治體制等方面?？傊?，我再次回到前文提到的觀點，我們正在邁向一個難以治理的后城市時代，而且這不僅是在中國。不斷增長的自組織力量產(chǎn)生巨大的低效，對我們所希望看到的人類持續(xù)繁榮產(chǎn)生威脅。

4 上?！昂蟪鞘小睍r期的規(guī)劃應(yīng)對

在中國，后城市化的發(fā)展并不均衡。但在長三角地區(qū)，超過1億人生活在10萬km2的土地上，區(qū)域擁有22個大城市。根據(jù)上文的定義描述，后城市化的趨勢在這里已經(jīng)十分明顯了。從日常需求來看，區(qū)域已成為復(fù)合的整體，在經(jīng)濟上、物理空間上、社會結(jié)構(gòu)上，未來甚至無可避免在政治方面，都緊緊地交織在一起。這樣的一個城市區(qū)域組織方式，很大程度上源自“自組織系統(tǒng)”，盡管這不一定是最有效率的組織方式。因此，城市的超級有機體是一種人類集聚的新形式，那么城市規(guī)劃會面對哪些挑戰(zhàn)呢？

在面對這樣一個龐大和焦灼的城市環(huán)境時，規(guī)劃師缺乏控制一切的工具。相較于人為制定的法律的影響，我們的生存環(huán)境更多地受到數(shù)以百萬的參與者的增量相互調(diào)整來應(yīng)對環(huán)境擾動所產(chǎn)生的影響 ?？刂普摰旎咧坏牧_斯·阿什比教授提出了著名的“所需多樣性原則”，概括起來可以認為：任何問題的解決方案必須跟問題一樣復(fù)雜。當這個原則用于社會學(xué)時，任何一種單一學(xué)科（包括規(guī)劃學(xué)在內(nèi)）、任何一種單一模型對于復(fù)雜問題來說都過于簡單?？茖W(xué)的力量在于抽象現(xiàn)實，將自然現(xiàn)象和社會現(xiàn)象歸納成模型、模式和模塊，是對現(xiàn)實世界的高度概括。但沒有一種模型能告訴我們未來該怎么做。換句話說，長三角的城市超級有機體是不可能用總體規(guī)劃進行控制的。

作為規(guī)劃師，我們對模型有著太多的信心，對抽象化問題有著太多的眷戀。直觀地來說，我們通過一些其他方法來探究所需多樣性，主要有以下3條路徑：

第一個方法是讓利益相關(guān)方的每個成員都更好地獲取信息，來降低行為的風險和不確定性。比較成功的例子是上世紀40年代末和50年代，法國中央政府在戰(zhàn)后重建的過程中引入的“指示性規(guī)劃”，將注意力放在新的投資方面，包括政府投資和大開發(fā)商的投資。當然，指示性規(guī)劃的周期盡管比較短，但在項目過程中，所有利益相關(guān)方在國家規(guī)劃師的組織下進行定期的磋商，對規(guī)劃和建設(shè)進行調(diào)整和決議，增加了政府、開發(fā)商和民眾之間的理解，從而降低了項目開發(fā)的不確定性和風險。

第二個辦法是通過參與性規(guī)劃來達到信息共享的目的。參與性規(guī)劃在涉及民眾生活質(zhì)量的公共政策制定中顯得尤為重要，尤其是當規(guī)劃從宏觀層面進入與生活空間有關(guān)的社區(qū)規(guī)劃時。參與性規(guī)劃的主要目標是吸引當?shù)厣鐓^(qū)的活躍成員，回應(yīng)他們對于社區(qū)生活改善的具體要求。這種類型的規(guī)劃是要在當?shù)卣褪忻裰g建立一個雙向的、開放的交流平臺。在一個千萬人口的區(qū)域，有數(shù)以千計的各種規(guī)模的社區(qū)，當?shù)氐木用袷歉纳飘數(shù)氐纳钯|(zhì)量的信息的最佳來源。一個對人民負責的政府有義務(wù)去聆聽這種聲音，并將這些建議整合到規(guī)劃當中去。

中國“智域”的出現(xiàn)，為信息共享創(chuàng)造更多的機會。我們現(xiàn)在能夠通過手持設(shè)備、iphone、微信等工具將更多的人納入其中。規(guī)劃師在利用這些新技術(shù)方面有點滯后。比如說在鄰里空間中，多種類型的分散式公共空間開始呈現(xiàn)，開始對于他們相關(guān)的任何事情都感興趣，比如食品安全、空氣污染、生態(tài)足跡、景觀破壞、住房需求、體育場館、健康問題、腐敗行為等。這些分散式的專業(yè)公共領(lǐng)域的知識可以與鄰里空間一樣被采用。我們需要傾聽他們所關(guān)注的，而且需要鼓勵他們積極參與到規(guī)劃中。

在中國，上訪已經(jīng)有很悠久的歷史了，民眾對不公正的抱怨或請求當局提供幫助。但是今天的技術(shù)進步能夠讓我們做得更多。如今，所有的信息都能由人民自下而上傳遞到政府，從而改變了過去自上而下的傳遞方式。例如，中國通常對災(zāi)難事件保持沉默，如火車事故、化工廠污染、工廠失火等。在互聯(lián)網(wǎng)時代，這種沉默不再有用，信息很快會傳播到全國各地。政府可能擔憂人民失去信心，但是對災(zāi)難事件的沉默只會取得相反的效果。人民會惱怒沒有被告知而無法宣泄沮喪與被戲耍玩弄。如果缺少批判的聲音，也就沒有社會化學(xué)習(xí)。而在快速變化的環(huán)境中，這種社會化學(xué)習(xí)對于好的規(guī)劃是至關(guān)重要的。

最后，想評論合作式規(guī)劃，特別是在那些正在經(jīng)歷城市化過程的城市邊緣區(qū)。中國的城市邊緣區(qū)受中心城市管轄，因為他們對于中心城市的功能非常重要。比如，為城市提供新鮮食物，為新產(chǎn)業(yè)與其他大項目提供土地，流域被保護，蓄水池被保護，為城市居民提供開放休閑空間，生活垃圾、廢水處理，新的房產(chǎn)建設(shè)等。所有這些需求都將被安置在越來越狹小與不斷收縮的空間。由于與城市中心非常接近，不同城市中心的城市邊緣區(qū)最終會接合為統(tǒng)一的空間，被鄰近的城市中心所共享。盡管這種共享會導(dǎo)致緊張，但是如果各方能夠?qū)缧姓吔绲耐恋乩靡?guī)劃的合作達成共識，這種矛盾就能夠避免。當前，每個城市中心都在為吸引投資而與其他城市競爭，不愿進行項目合作。我希望這種狀況能夠改變，特別是在像長三角地區(qū)的城市超級有機體中，這些區(qū)域越來越像一個單一的整體。

在此沒有談?wù)摮鞘谐売袡C體的治理問題，治理要求跨行政邊界的大規(guī)模合作，達到整體大于部分的效果。國外有很多關(guān)于大都市區(qū)和區(qū)域治理的文獻，但是這些文獻對于中國的城市超級有機體來說作用不大。因為國外的治理傳統(tǒng)與中國非常不同，因此難以幫助長三角地區(qū)。所以，我只想提醒一下，只要區(qū)域中的系統(tǒng)熵力，特別是關(guān)于環(huán)境和各種不斷增長的社會不均衡形成的熵力，持續(xù)地起作用并占據(jù)優(yōu)勢，區(qū)域治理問題遲早能夠解決。

（本文以約翰·弗里德曼教授于2013年7月8日在上海市規(guī)劃和國土資源管理局舉辦的“大師講壇”上的報告為基礎(chǔ)，進行翻譯、整理和編輯，以饗讀者。）