经济学人: 推行新城市主义?白人群飞现象频发(上)

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　　Lots of prominent American companies are moving downtown. 美国大量名企正迁向城市。

　　Fifty years ago American companies started to move their Headquarters away from city centres to the suburbs. 五十年前，许多美国公司将总部从城市中心搬往郊区。

　　Some critics blamed the exodus¹ on “white flight”, as businesses followed their employees out of increasingly crime-ridden cities. 同时，大量员工也随着公司迁出了犯罪率日益上升的城市，有写批评家将这种大规模迁出现象称为“白人群飞”。

　　The firms themselves ascribed it to corporate² responsibility. 而公司自身将此现象称为企业责任。

　　They provided offices in safe neighbourhoods and near good schools—one academic, Louise Mozingo, of the University of California, Berkeley, calls it “pastoral capitalism”. 为员工提供一个毗邻巍巍学府，且周边环境安全和谐的工作区域，加州大学伯克利分校路易斯·莫津戈学院将此现象称为“田园式的资本主义”。

　　Whatever the reason, it created a new type of HQ: not an office tower in the pumping heart of a metropolis³ but a leafy campus in the middle of nowhere. 不管出于何种原因，这种现象催生了一种新型总部模式：将总部理想选址从大都市中心区高耸的办公楼里转向绿化优美、人烟稀少的校园式环境。

　　Now a growing number of companies are moving back again. 如今，越来越多的公司正迁回城市。

　　The most prominent example is General Electric, which abandoned New York City for a 68-acre campus in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1974,  最典型的例子就是通用电气，通用曾在1974年为了位于康涅狄克州费尔菲尔德地区的68英亩（约275185.8平方米）土地而离开了纽约，

　　but is now swapping⁴ its bucolic⁵ site for a collection of warehouses⁶ on the Boston waterfront. 而最近却用其郊区土地来交易波士顿河畔的大片仓库。

　　There are legions more. 这样的例子还有很多。

　　Chicago’s downtown has attracted an impressive collection of HQs, from both the surrounding suburbs and from farther afield,  芝加哥中心区也吸引了大量郊区和远郊的名企，

　　including McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Motorola Solutions, ,and Archer⁷ Daniels Midland, a food-commodities giant. 例如麦当劳、卡夫亨氏、摩托罗拉、以及粮食巨头阿彻丹尼尔斯米德兰。

　　Zappos, an online retailer⁸, has moved from an office park outside Las Vegas into the city’s old downtown. 电商Zappos已经将办公室从拉斯维加斯郊区搬到老城中心区。

　　Biogen moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Boston suburbs in 2011 only to re-turn a year later. 2011年从曼彻斯特的剑桥迁入波士顿郊区的百健艾迪，一年后又迁回剑桥。

　　Many tech companies were born urban and couldn’t be any other way. 而许多科技公司一开始就在城市创办，并无其他选择。

　　Twitter and Sales force are in downtown San Francisco, and Jeff Bezos is building a huge campus for Amazon in downtown Seattle. 此外，推特以及Salesforce的总部也坐落于旧金山市中心区，而亚马逊的首席执行官杰夫·贝佐斯正在西雅图中心区新建一片办公园区。

　　City boosters are delighted. 支持城市的民众对此很高兴。

　　“This is better than hosting the Olympics,” says Shirley Leung, a columnist⁹ with the Boston Globe, of GE’s move. 为通用电气的搬迁撰文的专栏作家雪莉·莱翁表示，“如此多的公司迁回城市胜过举办一场奥运会。”

　　Corporate executives sound like graduate students after their first reading of “The Rise of the Creative Class” By Richard Florida, an urbanophile intellectual. 公司高管们如同初习过亲城市派学者理查德?佛罗里达的《创意阶层的崛起》的毕业生一般。

　　Jeff Immelt, GE’s Chief executive, says that “we want to be at the centre of an ecosystem¹⁰ that shares our aspiration”,  通用首席执行官杰夫·伊梅尔特表示，“我们要处于共享诉求的生态系统中心。”

　　and notes that Boston attracts “a diverse, technologically¹¹ fluent workforce”. 还补充道，波士顿吸引了大量的多方面技术型人才。

　　Ann Klee, who is helping¹² to oversee¹³ GE’s move to Boston, says that the new headquarters will do without a car park, in order to encourage workers to use public transport. 负责通用搬迁工作的安·克莱称：为鼓励员工乘坐公共交通，新总部不会建停车场。

　　It will dispense¹⁴ with security gates and wants the public to come in. 公司将不再修建安全门，以便普通民众进出。

　　Greg Brown, the CEO of Motorola Solutions, commends downtown Chicago for its “energy, vibrancy¹⁵ and diversity”. 摩托罗拉的首席执行官雷格·布朗称：“（我们选择芝加哥中心）是因为其拥有能量、活力和多样性。”

　　Is the new urbanism all it is cracked up to be? 对新城市主义的大力褒奖是否实至名归？

　　It is easy to find counter-trends, given America’s size and variety: many CEOs continue to see a future in the suburbs of the sunbelt. 鉴于美国领土的规模和多样性，反例并不难寻：许多公司的高管仍然看好美国南部郊区阳光地带的未来。

　　ExxonMobil is building a headquarters for 10,000 people in the outskirts¹⁶ of Houston. 埃克森美孚公司正在休斯顿郊区修建能容纳10000人的办公楼。

　　Toyota is moving its North American headquarters from Torrance, California, to suburban¹⁷ Dallas. 丰田将其美国总部从加利福尼亚的托兰斯迁至达拉斯郊区。

　　There is also tax-and-benefits arbitrage¹⁸ going on: over the past decades, the suburbs have become complacent¹⁹ and downtowns have got hungrier. 这些举动的背后不乏税收利益的因素：在过去几十年间，郊区以其优惠的税收政策吸引了足够的企业，而市中心则因为繁重的税收无人问津。

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