2013年に一橋大學（後期日程）で出題された問題です。月曜日と金曜日に、パラグラフ毎に解説して參ります。
次の英文の読み、下の問いに答えなさい。（*を付した語句には、問題文の末尾に注がある。）
The demand for transportation hubs* has been declining for a century. Of the twenty largest cities in America in 1900, seven were ports where a river met the ocean (Boston, Providence, New York, Jersey City, Newark, Baltimore and San Francisco), five were ports where rivers met the Great Lakes (Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo), three were on the Mississippi (Minneapolis, St Louis and New Orleans), three on the Ohio river (Louisville, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh) and two on east coast rivers close to the ocean (Philadelphia and Washington). But the cost of transporting goods dropped by 90 per cent in real terms in the twentieth century, removing the need for each region to have its own manufacturing and distribution hub.
A century of cheap internal combustion engines* meant people could move themselves and their goods over long distances at ever lower cost. Cheap transportation pushed Americans away from Cleveland and Detroit and towards the cheap land and warm weather in large southern cities like Phoenix, Arizona, which has grown by a third to 1.5 million people in the last fifteen years. Most of those twenty cities named above are perfect examples of industrial decline. Only six still make today’s top twenty. And of America’s sixteen biggest cities in 1950, only four have a larger population today than then, even though the national population has doubled since.
It might seem that the twenty-first-century revolution of information technology (IT) and digitization* (1) ought to have completed the job. Teleworking* can remove the need to transport people to the workplace or even have a physical workplace at all. And yet several of the cities that seemed to be dying in the 1970s ―― New York, Chicago and London ―― have since had remarkable revivals.
In a sense, what they have done is to re-create the spirit that inspired the city-states of medieval and early modern Europe. (2) Globalization, and particularly the digitization of information, means that cities have again begun to owe more to their ability to attract international markets than to their direct links with local economies.
For the elites in many highly specialized industries like advertising, it would appear that face-to-face contact with clients and with each other remains essential. The most digitized and computerized industries ―― media, software, financial services ―― cluster in expensive urban or suburban areas like Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In central London’s Soho, a small and highly specialized industry of post-production* movie companies continues to cluster. If you don’t drink with other producers in the pubs in Soho, you miss out on the best work. New York is the only one out of the sixteen largest cities in the Northeastern or Midwestern states whose population is larger than fifty years ago.
Similarly there is no particular reason that anyone at all, apart from government officials, should live in Madrid. The city sits alone in the middle of a high plain ―― remarkably, it is the highest capital in Europe ―― which is brutally hot in summer and chilly in winter. Yet, by retaining a sufficient number of corporate headquarters and financial services, it has fought off the challenges of apparently attractive cities like Barcelona.
Agglomeration* is replacing the location of natural resources and physical trade as a main reason for living in cities. Even entirely new industries generally create an urban cluster rather than spreading themselves around evenly. The southern Indian city of Hyderabad went from one million to 7 million inhabitants in a couple of decades when the IT industry suddenly appeared. The immigrants who work in many growing industries, also, move to where similar immigrants already live, creating a self-reinforcing dynamic.
But because clustering could take place anywhere, the competition between cities has become more acute and the difference between successes and failures more evident. When Chicago was the only big port on the southern west coast of Lake Michigan, it had a local natural monopoly. When the importance of physical trade declined, it became merely one of the many cities ―― Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee ―― that could have been the commercial and finance hub of the Midwest. Chicago had not just to coexist with the competition but to beat it ―― in particular expanding its commodity trading business and holding it in the face of competition from cities like New York.
In the same way that some companies dominate certain markets, a limited number of cities will specialize in one industry. Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore share Asia’s financial market trading, and have held it firmly in the face of competition. Many predicted, for example, that Shanghai would take Hong Kong’s role as the entrepôt* for China when the territory was returned to the Chinese in 1997. Singapore offered 40,000 visas to professionals from Hong Kong that year, particularly in finance, hoping to secure its own position. However, many of them stayed in Hong Kong, where there was a bigger concentration of expertise and experience.
Once a city gets a dominant position in a growing and highly skilled industry like international financial services, it is hard to shift. Highly skilled workers move to cities that already have a large number of people like them. A little like medieval city-states, places like London and New York already look detached from their surrounding economies. They are more international, more ethnically mixed and more liberal about social and sexual customs. Try to imagine the mayor of an American city other than New York living for a while, as did Rudy Giuliani, with a gay couple, and then moving into the mayor’s residence with a girlfriend, not his wife.
Many cities want to create clusters, but there are few examples of building them successfully from scratch. An interesting experiment (which Singapore, among others, started watching anxiously) was undertaken in Dubai, which poured billions of dollars of the Emirates’* oil money into the city to try to create clusters like biotechnology research. But such artificial attempts, requiring massive amounts of money, always run the risk of creating distortions and bubbles, and the Dubai experiment ran into some trouble after the Emirates’ state-backed companies ended up with more debt than they could handle.
In addition, cities are being revived as places to live. People like to spend time with similar people for play as well as work. It is not just the financial but also the dating markets of London and New York that are much deeper and more active than in the provinces. Cities are not just good places to produce services but the best places to consume them. The income of consumers in rich economies is spent mainly not on more stuff ―― computers, TVs, even clothes, (3) all / any / are / case / dropping / in / of / prices / whose ―― but on personal services: eating out, gyms, facial treatments, movies and theatres. This gives a natural advantage to cities, because the more other people there are, the more likely it is that such services will be provided.
And this is particularly true (4) as demand becomes more specialized and exclusive. Consumers want not just to see the same movies that everyone can see in provincial towns but world-class theatre and music, to eat food not just from chain restaurants but from world-class kitchens. Self ridges, the long-established London department store, ran an advertising campaign a few years ago designed, it would appear, to upset visitors from the provinces. ‘It’s Worth Living in London,’ the slogan said, above a series of photographs of rural boredom. The popular media representation of New York in the 1970s was the movie Taxi Driver, which showed the city as a violent place; that of the latest decade ―― the TV show Sex and the City ―― shows it as a safe, pleasant adult playground.
In America, the ratio of housing costs to real wages in cities has risen sharply in recent decades. People, it appears, are choosing to live in cities for reasons other than employment. Cities like New York and London, and even Washington DC, have managed to redevelop dangerous areas close to the city centre. Often this has more to do with leisure than with work. The south bank of the Thames, for example, a lively but unsafe area back when Parliament was in revolt against the king, has recently been revitalized by the opening of the Tate Modern art gallery and the enormous success of Borough Market, now one of London’s most fashionable food markets. Back in the 1970s, at the low point of its existence, New York’s Times Square was a neglected, crime-ridden wasteland; it has since been reborn. Even if the populations of these cities sometimes do not change, it does not necessarily mean that they are failing. City living increasingly means single people living alone, and a continual turnover whereby new urban residents replace those who burn out, or start having children, and head for the suburbs.
If current trends continue, there will be many more cities but also, quite likely, a bigger contrast between relative winners and losers. (5) Just as globalization subjects companies to fiercer competition, increasing further the returns to successful businesses and reducing those to failing ones, so the gaps between the cities that are winning and those that are losing will become increasingly obvious.
All of this means that cities are not only continuing to play a central role in the future of human well-being, but the way those cities are run is also becoming more important. (6) The golden eggs are getting bigger, and the geese more bad-tempered. Single-industry cities can also be affected by declines in that industry. Given the substantial damage being caused to the financial services industry by the economic crisis that spread so rapidly in 2008, cities like London and New York where the bankers gathered are likely to have to work harder to continue to thrive. Tolerance for pollution, overcrowding, high taxes and poor transportation will diminish along with pay bonuses. Clusters can scatter as well as gather. Florence, Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, even Amsterdam ―― all, over the past millennium, have at one time or another been city-state entrepôts of huge international significance. All are now relatively left behind.
A successful city is a hard thing to build, and a world-class one even harder. Incompetent governments have limited and even destroyed the growth of so many cities in the past that people should be neither complacent nor pessimistic about urbanization. 【1714 words】
注 hub （交通・輸送・産業の）拠点 internal combustion engine 内燃機関 digitization デジタル化 teleworking IT機器を活用した、場所・時間に制約されない勤務形態 post-production 撮影後の作業に携わる agglomeration （産業・企業の）集積 entrepôt 商品の輸出入の中心となる都市 (United Arab) Emirates アラブ首長国連邦
１ 下線部(1)の内容を文脈に即して具体的に日本語で説明しなさい。
２ 下線部(2)を和訳しなさい。
３ 下線部(3)の語を並べ替えて、意味の通る文を作りなさい。
４ 下線部(4)の単語が同じ意味で使われている文を以下の選択肢イ～ニから一つ選びなさい。
イ Rome became twice as large as any city before in human history.
ロ As Descartes said of Amsterdam, cities are an inventory of the possible.
ハ As a city, Rome revealed all too clearly the flaws in the realm that it ran.
ニ As Rome moved towards becoming an empire, it extended further into Asia.
５ 下線部(5)を和訳しなさい。
６ 下線部(6)の内容を文脈に即して具体的に日本語で説明しなさい。
７ 産業の集中が原因で起こる都市の成長とはどのようなものか。具体例を挙げながら、90字以内の日本語（句読点を含む）で説明しなさい。
８ 都市間に競争が生じ勝者と敗者が生まれるのはなぜか。100字以内の日本語（句読点を含む）で説明しなさい。
９ 人びとが都市の生活に引き寄せられるのはなぜか。100字以内の日本語（句読点を含む）で説明しなさい。
