城市笔记之三:他们的地图,他们的蓝图

Notes on City (No.3) : The Russian Map and the Russian Plan

鸦片战争之后,中国人对于世界的认识和描述方式开始发生了根本性动摇和改变。现代的测绘、制图、规划方式,率先进入了香港、上海、大连、青岛等租界城市,并由此产生了深远的影响。本文从甲午战争之后俄罗斯人为大连所测绘的一张地形图讲起,讨论了现代地图的特点,并在大连开埠史中,初探了地形图、规划与殖民者的具体关系。这一分析没有停留在地图的话语层面上,而是侧重于从土地到制图到规划的过程。当年,殖民者把别人的土地一步步地消解成了没有历史的生地,把他乡当作故乡去规划。而如今,中国规划师们通过同样的过程在规划家乡时,反倒像在规划他乡一般。

The map in this essay refers specifically to a small scale Dalian regional terrain map produced by the Russian surveyors after the 1884＇s Sino-Japanese war .Despite its seemingly value-free appearance, such a land survey mapping technique owns a unique quality that the pre-modern mapmaking practice did not have. Its abstraction and reduction of landscape into contour lines has transformed terrain into a data-scape proper, waiting to be further processed, in Dalian＇s case, after a fashionable Baroque city image, into land-use plan. Hardly ever, within this kind of mapping process, came to fore the locals＂ experience and their perception of landscape. The Colonialist blue-print imposed itself a vision foreign to the site, taking other＇s place as tabula-rasa, or to be more predse, as a denuded nature. In a twisted way, planners in China today have been so adapted to such a kind of mapping process, and tend to forget that no matter how accurate a map may be, it could never be taken as a substitute of the people＇s life experience about their homeland.