Is Houston Still a Model City? Its Supporters Aren’t Backing Down
休士頓仍是模範城？ 支持者挺
By Emily Badger

Houston is a prime example – of what depends on your point of view.
休士頓是個典範：是什麼樣的典範則取決於你的觀點。

It’s an example of development run amok, of how sprawl can devour nature. It’s what you get when everything as far as the eye can see is designed around cars instead of people.
它是開發無度，無止境擴張如何吞噬自然的一個例子。它也是放眼所及，無一不是針對車輛而非人而設計的一座城市。

It’s an example, according to a very different interpretation, of how to create affordable housing. It’s proof that fewer regulations mean more prosperity, that the market knows better than any central planner.
根據非常不同的解讀，它是如何打造買得起的住宅的一個例子。它是減少規定造就更多繁榮，市場比任何中央規劃者更高明的一個明證。

It’s a Rorschach city, and it has been since well before Hurricane Harvey, occupying a special place at the center of a debate over how best to build in the United States. But even now, when something about the Houston model looks terribly fragile, its free-market boosters are doubling down on what the city should mean to the rest of us. And the storm’s legacy is poised to make this high-stakes fight over the Houston way even more raw.
它是怎麼樣的一個城市，可謂見仁見智。早在「哈維」颶風來臨前，它就一直是如此，且在美國如何以最佳方式打造一座城市的核心辯論中，占據特別地位。然而即使是現在，當休士頓模式的某些東西看起來非常脆弱時，它的自由市場推動者仍在加重強調這個城市對我們其他人應該具有的意義。這場暴風雨帶來的後遺症，看來會讓休士頓模式這個關乎重大的爭論變得更加血淋淋。

“Houston reaffirms people’s pre-existing biases about how cities should be built,” said William Fulton, a longtime former planner and mayor in California who now directs the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.
曾在加州長期擔任規劃者與市長，現為休士頓萊斯大學金德學院城市研究中心所長的威廉．富爾頓說：「休士頓再次確立了人們對一座城市該如何興建的成見。」

It’s the model of precisely what not to do, unless you believe that it gets all the big questions right.
它正是代表未來不該怎麼做的負面模式，除非你認為它把所有重大問題都處理得很好。

Late last year, a Houston-based think tank called the Center for Opportunity Urbanism released a report titled “The Texas Way of Urbanism,” a blueprint that emphasizes light regulation and fast growth. In contrast to older cities like New York, Chicago and Boston, cities like Houston, the report argued, have avoided prescriptive development standards to create an affordable environment that has lured hundreds of thousands of people over the last generation.
去年年底，設於休士頓的智庫「機會城市計畫中心」發表題為「德州式城市規劃」的報告，這份藍圖強調輕度管理和快速發展。有別於紐約、芝加哥和波士頓這些老城市，該報告認為，像休士頓這樣的城市避開了規範性的開發標準，從而創造出一個負擔得起的環境，在上一世代吸引了數十萬人進住。

“The future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: Texas,” two of the report’s authors, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, wrote.
報告作者中的兩位，約爾．柯特金和溫德爾．柯克斯寫道：「美國城市的未來可歸納成兩個字：德州。」

Their report was prescient last fall in one notable sense. Houston’s challenges include inadequate infrastructure against flooding, the report noted, months before Harvey. But the answer, it added, isn’t for Houston to mimic tighter regulation, transit investments or compact development elsewhere.
他們去年秋天完成的這份報告在一個值得注意的意義上算是具有先見之明。報告指出，休士頓的挑戰包括防洪設施不足。數個月後，「哈維」颶風來襲。不過，報告也說，答案不在於休士頓應該師法其他城市，採取較嚴格的規定，投資於運輸或進行緊湊型發展。

In the week since the storm began to retreat in Texas, a chorus of planners, scientists and pundits has yelled largely the opposite.
暴風雨開始從德州撤離的一周中，一群規劃師、科學家和專家學者高聲說出了他們的想法，大致是跟這個報告唱反調。

Harvey, they say, makes arguably the strongest case yet that Houston’s free-market model may have a fatal flaw.
他們說，休士頓自由市場模式可能存在致命缺陷，哈維颶風可謂提供了最強而有力的證據。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/upshot/is-houston-still-a-model-city-its-supporters-arent-backing-down.html

2017-09-24．聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 王麗娟

說文解字看新聞 王麗娟

今年八月底，美國德州遭遇50年來最強颶風「哈維」，3天內降下1年的雨量，帶來嚴重洪患（flooding）， 德州最大城、全美第四大城休士頓鬧區也泡在水中。本文在「哈維」於休士頓釀災後，探討休士頓模範城市（model city）的地位是否依舊。

文章第二段的sprawl 指的是urban sprawl（城市擴張、城市蔓延），係指一種無秩序的城市發展狀態。 城市擴張時，人類許多時候必須與山林爭地，因此文中指出城市擴張會吞噬大自然。

文中也說，休士頓一直是個見仁見智的城市（Rorschach city），人們根據他們既有的觀點，各自解讀發生於休士頓的事。Rorschach指的是Rorschach test（羅氏墨漬測驗、羅夏克墨跡測驗），是一種心理測驗。測試的方法是讓受測者觀看一系列的墨漬圖形圖片，再讓受測者說出對圖片的觀感或選擇一個適當答案。每位受測者觀感不一，但可協助心理學家發現受測者的人格特質和情感功能，有時可從中找出精神病患。

Congo’s Specialty Brews Look to Be the ‘Future of Coffee’
剛果精品咖啡：明日看我
BY Clair MacDougall

Linda Mugaruka perched her nose above a steaming cup of coffee. Swilling and then spitting, she noted that it was clean and sweet with traces of fruit. On her clipboard she scrawled 94, a high score for a specialty coffee.
琳達．穆加魯卡將鼻子放在一杯冒著熱氣的咖啡上。她喝了一大口再將它吐出。她發現這咖啡清爽、甘甜且帶著果香。她在筆記板上潦草寫下94，對精品咖啡算是高分。

Mugaruka, 24, is one of a few cuppers, or coffee tasters, from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the only woman working as a cupper in the region. This spring, flanked by connoisseurs from South Korea and the United States, she stood over some of the most coveted cups of specialty coffee from her homeland at the nation’s fledgling annual coffee festival, held here in the eastern city of Bukavu.
24歲的穆加魯卡是來自剛果民主共和國東部的幾位咖啡杯測師（或稱咖啡品評師）之一，也是該地區唯一的女杯測師。今年春天，剛果初創的年度咖啡節在東部布卡武市此間舉行，她在南韓、美國鑑賞家圍繞下，負責監督來自她的老家、最令人垂涎的幾杯精品咖啡的製作。

At the gathering, called the Saveur du Kivu, or Flavor of Kivu, cuppers sought to discover new flavors from a nation troubled by conflict and political instability, yet believed to be one of Africa’s most promising producers of specialty coffee, with the potential to be one of the world’s biggest producers of commercial-grade coffee as well.
在這項名為「基伍風味」的聚會中，咖啡師試圖發現新風味。剛果是個飽受衝突與政治不安困擾的國家，但據信也是非洲最有前途的精品咖啡生產國之一，而且具有成為全球商業級咖啡最大生產國之一的潛力。

Coffee was once Congo’s second-biggest export, after copper, contributing an estimated $164 million to the nation’s economic output in the 1980s. But during recent decades of conflict, exports dropped drastically.
咖啡曾是剛果僅次於銅的第二大出口商品，1980年代曾對國家經濟產出貢獻約1.64億美元。但近幾十年因衝突不斷，咖啡出口銳減。

Now, with millions of dollars in donor funding in recent years to build the coffee industry and help stabilize the region, coffee exports have steadily increased and farming cooperatives are attracting the attention of global buyers like Starbucks and the Israeli company Strauss. This is despite an overall economic crisis in Congo, political turmoil over President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his term and violence including atrocities carried out by a government-linked militia that were cited by the United Nations.
而如今，由於近幾年有數百萬美元捐助資金用於打造咖啡業與促進區域穩定，咖啡出口出現穩定成長，該國的農業合作社也開始吸引全球買家如星巴克和以色列史特勞斯公司的眼光。儘管這段期間剛果還發生了全面經濟危機，總統約瑟夫．卡比拉任滿拒絕下台引發政治動盪，以及林林總總的暴力事件，包括聯合國所譴責的民兵暴行，這些民兵與政府有關聯。

During the first half of the 20th century, as the country was subjected to exploitative Belgian rule, extensive coffee plantations rolled through the green hills of eastern Congo. The country’s beans were roasted in coffee houses in Brussels and Rome, and its coffee was among the world’s finest.
廿世紀上半葉，在剛果仍受制於比利時的剝削統治期間，連綿的咖啡園遍佈剛果東部的青山。該國的咖啡豆在布魯塞爾和羅馬的咖啡館裡烘焙，剛果的咖啡是世界頂級的咖啡。

The coffee industry was decimated after rebel groups marched through those fields in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the toppling of Congo’s long-standing dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, in 1997.
1994年盧安達發生種族大屠殺，1997年剛果長期獨裁者莫布杜被推翻後，叛軍團體穿過這些林地，咖啡業同時遭到摧毀。

原文參照：
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/world/africa/democratic-republic-congo-specialty-coffee.html

2017-09-24．聯合報．D4．紐約時報賞析 王麗娟