MIT城市规划软件将会帮助建设未来城市

译者 pieccon

BY Michael J. CorenWed Sep 7, 2011

作者：Michael J. Coren, 2011.09.07星期三

If we are to improve the quality of life in our cities--27 of which are expected to have more than 10 million people by 2020--we will have to find a better way to build them. MIT's new software will help.

如果我们要去改善我们城市的生活质量——有27座城市预计到2020年人口将会超过1千万——我们必须找出建设城市的更好方式。MIT（麻省理工大学）的新软件可以给予帮助。

Most of the world lives in cities. That number, now at about 3.3 billion people, will keep going up. During the next five years, urban populations are expected to soar well beyond half the world's total.

世界上很多人都住在城市。那个数字——现在大约是33亿人——将会持续增长。在未来的五年里，城市人口预计会疯狂飙升，并超过全球人口的一半。

Yet most of those urbanites are also likely to live in poorly, or at least haphazardly, designed cities. The expertise to create a well-planned metropolis is seldom available, especially in the developing world, where 30% of urban populations live in informal slums. Globally, 70% of today's urban growth (PDF) occurs outside the formal planning process. If nothing changes, the inefficiencies, pollution, and misery of modern dysfunctional cities may become the norm.

然而大部分城市人还可能生活在缺乏设计，或者至少是胡乱设计的城市中。创造一个精心策划的大都市的专门知识很少有用的，特别是在发展中国家——30%的城市人口生活在非正式的贫民窟里。全球来说，今天城市成长的70%（PDF）是发生在正式规划流程之外。如果不作出任何改变，那么现代功能失调城市的低效、污染、穷困就可能成为常态。

Avoiding that future just became a bit easier with the launch of the Urban Network Analysis, an open-source software released by MIT. Taking a cue from social networks and mathematical network analysis methods, the City Form Research Group's program calculates how a cities' spatial layout affects the way people will live in it.

城市网络分析（UNA）——由MIT发布的一个开源软件——的出现使得避免那样的将来变得更简单了。根据社交网络和数学网络分析方法的提示，城市形态研究组项目计算城市空间布局如何影响人们在其中生活的方式。

It measures traits such as "reach, gravity, betweenness, closeness, and straightness," which, in laymen terms, express features such as the number of services, buildings, and resources within a certain walking distance, or the volume of traffic along sidewalks and streets. Designers can also assign characteristics to individual buildings, as well as track urban growth and change with analytic support for policy makers.

它会量度各种特征，如“可达性、引力、介数、亲密度和笔直性”，直白点来说，就是表达了各种特性，如某个步行距离内的服务、建筑和资源的数量，或者沿着人行道和街道的交通量。设计师还可以指定单个建筑的特征，同时追踪城市的成长与改变以给政策制定者分析性支持。

What this means is that city planners can look at their cities and see, for instance, that some neighborhoods are closer to jobs than others (the map at the top is the "reach" map for jobs in Cambridge, MA. Red means closer to jobs). Knowing this, planners might want to build transportation from green areas to red areas. It can also predict things like street traffic: Good to know if you want to create a commercial zone where you will need walk-in customers.

这就意味着，城市规划师可以看到他们的城市，还可以看到很多信息，比如某些街坊离工作地方更近（上面那张地图就是马萨诸塞州剑桥的工作“可达性”地图。红色代表更接近工作地点）。知道这个以后，规划师可能会想到在绿色区域和红色区域之间建设交通运输系统。它还可以预测各种情况，诸如街道交通：当你想创造一个你将来需要步行顾客的商业街区时，你可以很好地了解情况。

Until now, claims MIT, no free tools were available for city planners to tackle the tough computational challenges of characterizing the dense tangle of streets, buildings, and transport in modern cities. MIT hopes the UNA toolbox, an open-source plug-in for the ArcGIS mapping program, will enable urban designers, architects, planners, and geographers around the world to better understand how the spatial patterns of cities will affect the way people live and move around their urban environments.

MIT称，直至目前为止，没有一款有用的免费工具提供给城市规划师处理描述现代城市里的街道、建筑和交通的密集纷乱这些高难度的计算任务。MIT希望这个UNA工具箱——ArcGIS地图制作程序的一款开源插件——将来可以使得全球的城市设计师、建筑师和地理学家能更好地了解城市的空间格局如何影响人们生活和活动在他们的城市环境中的方式。

The UNA toolbox can be downloaded here.

UNA工具箱可以在这里下载。

[Image: MIT]

【图像：MIT】