city reader.doc

组长：张静萍 组员： 张岸，陈伟韬，张静萍，韩晓波 庄苏琳，唐彩虹，陈竹篱，蔡艺坤 The future of cities Peter Hall Abstract It is argued that the death of distance will lead to the death of cities. but this ignores the significance of face-to-face contact and the continuing significance of agglomeration. We need a new theory of location of service industries to account for these effects,concentrating on the four key sectors of the informational economy: finance and business services, power and influence. creative and cultural industries. and tourism. This will need to account for the new polycentric form of major cities. and also for the changes in traditional central place systems that result from globalisation and the development of the informational service economy. It might be argued that cities have no future at all. Some experts predict the edeath of distance: a world in which the traditional distance-deterrence effects, embodied in every locational model. diminish to zero and the entire world becomes a frictionless plain on which it is perfectly easy to locate any activity anywhere (Cairncross. 1995,1997). In such a scenario, everyone will be free to locate in the place that best suits their personal preferences and whims. intercommunicating freely and at uniform cost with every other person in the world. Because the long-term trend in advanced societies has been for people to migrate from city to suburb and from suburb to countryside. so this scenario runs. we can expect a huge dispersal of human beings and human activities across continents. Five thousand and more years of city building will come to an end: the traditional advantages of the city as a place for doing business. and for living, will finally have been eroded. Fortunately for cities. there are problems with this formulation. First, though it is undoubtedly true that the long-term trend is for both transportation costs and communication costs to fall. and even fall dramatically, they never quite diminish to zero, n