恐怖主义危及欧洲城市的漫步传统
各种隔离屏障正在欧洲各地涌现。最近，一名恐怖分子驾驶货车在巴塞罗那的兰布拉大道(Las Ramblas)冲撞行人，数小时后，马德里方面在西班牙首都的太阳门广场摆上了巨型花盆。通向米兰大教堂的埃马努埃莱二世回廊的入口被丑陋的“新泽西”(new jerseys)堵住——意大利人之所以这样称呼它们，是因为美国新泽西州最先使用这种模块化的混凝土车道隔离墩。
Nice, victim of the worst vehicle attack to date, has only recently unveiled a white truck-resistant pillar-and-cable fence, cordoning off the Promenade des Anglais, where 86 people died on Bastille Day last year. London, hit by two attacks this year, has reinforced pedestrian walkways on bridges with concrete blocks.
曾发生过迄今最为严重的汽车恐怖袭击事件的尼斯，只是在最近才设置了一道防止卡车冲撞的白色柱状护栏，将“英国人散步大道”(Promenade des Anglais)隔离开——去年的法国国庆日，86人在此遇难。今年已经遭受两起恐怖袭击的英国，用水泥墩加强了对桥梁上的人行道的保护。
To the acute pain of further loss of innocent lives — tourists, shoppers, revellers — add the sinister, hard-to-define threat to something quintessentially European: the paseo, the passeggiata, the promenade.
对欧洲典型特征——散步、漫步者和滨海步行大道——的难以界定的险恶威胁，加深了无辜生命(游客、购物者和欢庆人群)陨落带来的刺痛。
“Walkability” has become a central tenet of urban planning. One study suggests that people living in walkable places engage in 100 minutes more physical activity a week than those who don’t. “Walking meetings”, as favoured by the late Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, are now modish ways to stimulate creativity in Silicon Valley and beyond.
“可步行性”已经成为城市规划的中心原则。一项研究表明，居住在适于步行的地方的人每周从事体育活动的时间比不住在此类地方的人多100分钟。马克•扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)和已故的史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)都推崇的“走动式会议”(walking meetings)，如今已成为硅谷等地激发创造力的时髦方式。
But we Europeans do not need to be told by professors and entrepreneurs that walking is good for us. We have been strolling sociably towards greater wellbeing for centuries.
但我们欧洲人不需要教授和企业家告诉我们步行的好处。几个世纪以来，我们一直在从容不迫地走向福祉程度更高的社会。
Arriving in Barcelona in 1826, the American naval officer Alexander Slidell Mackenzie took rooms overlooking “the Rambla”. The street, built over an old riverbed and at that time only recently urbanised, was “constantly frequented by every variety of people, and in the afternoon was thronged to overflowing”, he wrote in his travelogue A Year in Spain. Well-dressed men and women mingled with peasants, artisans, French officers and their girlfriends, students, curates and monks.
1826年抵达巴塞罗那的美国海军军官亚历山大•斯莱德尔•麦肯齐(Alexander Slidell Mackenzie)入住了可以俯瞰“兰布拉大道”的房间。他在游记《在西班牙的一年》(A Year in Spain)中写道，建于一段古河床之上且当时才刚刚完成城市化的这条大街，“总是有形形色色的人光顾，下午经常挤得水泄不通”。穿着考究的男女混迹在包括农夫、艺术家、法国官员及女伴、学生、牧师以及僧侣的人群中。
It goes without saying that the threat of imminent attack puts this tradition of ambulatory, open-air cosmopolitanism in jeopardy.
不用说，随时可能遭受袭击的威胁，让这种适于步行的户外世界主义传统陷入危险之中。
The essence of the stroll — which, in Paris, gave birth to the ideal of the flâneur, the leisurely observer of city life — is that it should be relaxed. When I lived in Milan, which is certainly not Italy’s most laid back city, a passeggiata in one’s Sunday best, past the Galleria and the Duomo, was a weekly restatement of one’s part in civilised society. The menace of terrorism will have already persuaded some nervous boulevardiers to divert to less populous places, take the car, or cower on the sofa at home. For those who do venture out, having to keep an eye out for murderers in vans wrecks the whole idea of a civilised city walk as an exercise in stress-free people watching.
漫步的本质在于它应该是让人放松的——在巴黎，散步催生了漫步者的理想，即作城市生活悠闲的观察者。住在米兰的时候——米兰当然不是意大利最慵懒的城市——我发现，穿上自己最好的衣服，漫步穿过埃马努埃莱二世回廊和米兰大教堂是人们在文明社会中每周的必修课。恐怖主义的威胁已经让一些惶恐的巴黎林荫大道咖啡店的主顾转向人不那么多的地方、驾车或者窝在家里的沙发上。对那些敢于冒险外出的人来说，他们不得不时刻注意货车里是否藏有恐怖分子，使得人们在文明城市漫步时无法再毫无压力地观察人群。
It doesn’t do to romanticise the notion too much. These days, Las Ramblas is as much an overcrowded tourist attraction as a civic amenity. It has “evolved from being the favourite street of Barcelonans to a street many avoid”, Eduard Cabré, an urban planning consultant, told website Citylab shortly after the attacks.
过于浪漫化这种观点没有用。昔日供人休闲漫步的兰布拉大道，如今已变成一个人满为患的旅游景点。城市规划咨询顾问爱德华•卡布雷(Eduard Cabré)在恐袭发生后不久对Citylab网站表示，它已经“从巴塞罗那人钟爱的大街变成了许多人避之不及的大街”。
And of course, local authorities need to protect citizens from likely threats. Hence the new bollards on many of our boulevards.
当然，当地政府需要保护公民免遭意外威胁的伤害。因此，我们许多步行街道出现了新的路桩。
At the same time, though, “we really don’t want to abolish pedestrians or we will end up with ghost cities”, as Marialena Nikolopoulou of Kent School of Architecture told me. She and others have tested clever alternatives to fortifying public spaces, such as using mirrors or floor markings to make pedestrians act playfully, so that suspicious behaviour stands out.
然而，与此同时，正如肯特建筑学院(Kent School of Architecture)的Marialena Nikolopoulou对我所言：“我们真的不想让行人消失，那样我们的城市最终将变为鬼城。”她和其他人测试了加固公共场所的更聪颖的替代方案，比如使用镜子或者地面记号来让步行者表现地更加欢愉，这样可疑行为就会引起注意。
It is worth a try, if only to safeguard the public demonstration of civic sociability and friendly exchange so admired by generations of visitors.
这值得尝试，但愿它能够捍卫这种被一代又一代的游客倾慕不已的公民社交和友好交流的公共形式。
“Who can say enough in praise of the paseo?” Mackenzie wrote in the 1820s. “It furnishes an amusement at once delightful and innocent, and from which not even the poorest are excluded, a school where the public manners are softened and refined by social intercourse and mutual observation; where families meet families, and friends meet friends, as upon a neutral ground.”
麦肯齐在19世纪20年代写道：“谁能穷尽对漫步的赞美?它可以立刻带来一种宜人而单纯的愉悦，甚至最穷的人也不会被排除在外，它是一个被社交和互相观察软化和洗炼的公共礼仪学校;它是一个家人和朋友见面的场所，有如一块中立之地。”
It is a measure of how hard terrorists have hit Europe that we now have to armour that innocent, neutral ground like a potential battlefield.
我们现在不得不将这一无辜中立之地武装得像潜在的战场一样，从中可以看出恐怖分子对欧洲的冲击有多大。
