雅思阅读 185: Pop-Up Parks and the Tactical City（快闪公园与战术城市）

改编自 Journal of Urban Health / MIT Senseable City Lab。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5533666/

Reading Passage

A. For most of the twentieth century, improving a city's public space meant waiting years for a capital project: a new park, a pedestrianised street, a redesigned square. Planning departments held public hearings, hired consultants, secured bonds and broke ground — sometimes a decade later. In the last fifteen years, however, a very different approach has spread across cities from New York to Jakarta. Known as "tactical urbanism," it uses low-cost, fast, reversible interventions — painted bike lanes, temporary plazas, parklets squeezed into a single parking space — to test an idea on the ground before committing public money to it. The movement was systematised by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, whose 2015 book framed small, do-it-yourself changes not as amateur disruption but as municipal research: a cheap, low-risk way to demonstrate what a street could become. Where a conventional redesign might cost millions of dollars and require years of political negotiation, a tactical intervention can be built in a weekend for a few thousand. The approach was initially associated with grassroots activism — community groups painting bike lanes overnight — but has since been adopted by city governments themselves, who now run their own temporary programmes as a deliberate policy tool.

B. The best-known early experiment took place in New York's Times Square in 2009. City officials temporarily closed several blocks to cars, replacing asphalt with plastic chairs, cheap planters and gravel. The intervention was supposed to last a summer. When the city measured the results, pedestrian injuries fell sharply and retail sales along the closed blocks rose, evidence strong enough to justify making the closure permanent. Times Square became the template: try something modest, measure it, keep what works. Similar temporary closures have since been trialled in cities as different as Bogotá, Paris and Kraków, each using the same logic of cheap experimentation followed by evidence-based permanence. The approach has been particularly attractive to cash-strapped municipalities, because a temporary plaza can be installed for a fraction of the cost of a permanent redesign. It also changes the politics: once residents sit on the new benches and see the streets quieter, they rarely want the cars back. The plastic chairs and gravel, temporary as they are, become more real to people than the abstract plans of engineers. Once a street has been used as a park, it is hard for drivers to see it only as a road again. The intervention changes what residents believe their street is for, and that change is hard to reverse once it has been felt.

C. Researchers have begun to study whether these short-lived interventions deliver measurable benefits. A widely cited case study examined a pop-up park called State Street Green, installed on a closed block in the downtown business district of Los Altos, California, during the summers of 2013 and 2014. Los Altos is a wealthy city of around 30,000 residents in the San Francisco Bay Area, with nine permanent parks already scattered through its residential neighbourhoods. The downtown itself, however, had no public open space — only shops, restaurants and cars. When construction closed a street segment, the city and a private investment group turned it into a temporary park with seating, plants and shade. Researchers used a standardised observation tool, the System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities, to record how many people used the space, their age and gender, and whether they were sitting, walking, playing or exercising. Observers visited the site at fixed times across both seasons.

D. The findings were striking. Park use remained high across most hours of the day, and the space attracted a multigenerational crowd, although children and adolescents were the most likely to walk or engage in more vigorous activity. Survey data showed that 85 per cent of the people using the pop-up park would not have visited any other park in the city if the temporary space had not existed. Users also reported spending more time outdoors and less time in front of screens. Perhaps most interesting from a city-planning perspective, the presence of the park significantly increased the odds that people would spend time in the downtown business district at all — suggesting that even a temporary public space can draw customers to the surrounding shops and restaurants. A separate analysis by MIT's Senseable City Lab, using anonymised transaction data over several years, reached a similar conclusion about short-term pedestrianisation: nearby retail establishments saw measurably higher sales during the closure periods, and the gains persisted when the closures were repeated.

E. Tactical urbanism is not without critics. Some planners argue that temporary interventions, especially when installed in already-wealthy neighbourhoods, can accelerate gentrification, attracting higher-income visitors and raising rents for existing businesses. Others point out that the approach works best where a supportive city government already exists, and that it can become an excuse for officials to avoid funding permanent, well-maintained parks in low-income areas that need them most. The Los Altos study, for instance, was conducted in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, and its authors themselves cautioned that larger, confirmatory studies were needed before generalising the results. Even so, the core insight has proven durable: cities do not need to choose between doing nothing and spending a fortune. A cheap, reversible, measurable experiment can reveal what residents actually want, and then the evidence can guide the permanent investment. The challenge for the next decade is to make that method work in places that lack both the wealth and the political will that Los Altos and Times Square enjoyed. The technique itself is cheap; the willingness to listen to what residents actually use, rather than what planners assume they want, is the harder ingredient. Without that willingness, even a well-designed pop-up park becomes another top-down failure.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The Times Square model: try, measure, keep ii. The origin of permanent parks in ancient cities iii. A case study: Los Altos' State Street Green iv. Evidence of benefits for users and local shops v. Criticisms and the limits of the approach vi. Why cities should ban all cars vii. The cost of building a new subway line

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. How does tactical urbanism differ from traditional urban planning? A. It requires decades of public hearings before starting. B. It uses cheap, temporary, reversible interventions first. C. It relies entirely on private funding with no public role. D. It only works in very poor neighbourhoods.

6. What happened after the 2009 Times Square experiment? A. The city immediately removed all chairs and reopened the road. B. Pedestrian injuries fell and retail sales rose, leading to permanent closure. C. Retail sales dropped sharply and the project was abandoned. D. The experiment was repeated only in Tokyo.

7. What did the Los Altos study find about the pop-up park? A. Almost no one used the space during the week. B. Most users said they would have visited another park anyway. C. Eighty-five per cent of users would not have used another park. D. The park discouraged people from visiting the downtown shops.

8. What criticism do opponents raise about tactical urbanism? A. It is too expensive to implement. B. It may accelerate gentrification and displace existing businesses. C. It only works in European cities. D. It requires building new subway lines.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia published a book on tactical urbanism in 2015.
10. The Times Square temporary closure was always intended to become permanent.
11. Los Altos had no permanent parks at all before the pop-up park.
12. The Los Altos study was conducted in a wealthy city.
13. The MIT Senseable City Lab study used personal credit card records to identify individual shoppers.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The Los Altos pop-up park attracted a (14) __________ crowd, and survey data showed that the space significantly increased the odds that people would visit the (15) __________ business district.

答案与解析

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