海天考研-2014年秋季六级-赵南望-阅读讲义.docVIP

2014考研英语辅导大学英语六级阅读讲义 第一部分（补充阅读） 主讲：赵南望 Text 1 Aristotle wrote that men come together in cities to live, but stay in them to live the good life. It was the Greeks who invented the idea of the city, and urbanity continues as a thriving tradition. But in the first decade of the 21 st century, urban life is changing. “Cities are now junctions in the flows of people, information, finance and freight,” says Nigel Harris, a professor of development planning. “They’re less and less places where people live and work.” The enlargement of the European Union in December in 2002 has given residents of up to 13 new member nations freedom of movement within its borders. At the same time, an additional 13.5 million immigrants a year will be needed in the EU just to keep a stable ratio between workers and pensioners over the next half century. All this mobility will make Europe’s cities nodes of nomadism, linked to each other by high-speed trains and cheap airline flights. The bustle around airports and train stations will make the crowds in Europe’s great piazza look thin by comparison. Urban designers, with a freshly pricked interest in transience rather than stasis, are even now dreaming up cityscapes that focus on flows of people and fungible uses for buildings. Public spaces are due for a revamp. Earlier architects conceived of train stations as single buildings; today’s designers are thinking of them as transit zones that link to the city around them, pouring travelers into bus stations and surrounding shops, In Amsterdam, urban planner Ben van Berkel, co-director of the design firm of UN Studio, has developed what he calls Deep Planning Strategy, which inverts the traditional “top-down” approach: the creation of a space comes before the flow of people through it. With 3-D modeling and animation, he’s able to look at different population groups use public spaces at different times of the day. He uses the data to design spaces that accommodate mobs at rush hour and sparser crow