翻译题 2.American urbanization went forward in the same climate of the unexpected that has characterized urbanization everywhere. Townsmen, home builders, immigrants, businesses, and governments have made their way in a setting of constant change. They have dwelt in a space they could never know or predict. The settlement , the building and rebuilding, the economy and the governance of American cities thus takes the shape of a history of peoples who brought commonly accepted knowledge and traditions to a situation that demanded continuing adaptation and change.
Today the United States is a thoroughly urbanized nation. Only 3. 4 percent of the population still farms, and everyone else, regardless of the size of the settlement, is employed in urban-type jobs. Yet for all the novelty of the present situation, survivals of past stages of American urbanization continues as active tensions within the new totally urbanized setting.
The racial conflicts between whites and blacks, devolving from the seventeenth century enslavement of Africans, grind on. Seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century conflicts among farmers, village merchants, city brokers, and bankers go forward in the politics of governments-subsidized agriculture and government-managed banking. The rivalries among developers, contractors, and cities that characterized the building of nineteenth century canals and railroads reappear in the politics of interstate highways, airplanes, and telecommunications. The specialized city districts that first took shape in the nineteenth century now have been magnified a thousand times into the giant mosaics of metropolitan suburbs, industrial and office parks, shopping centers, and resort and retirement settlements. The community-destroying tensions of relative poverty amidst great wealth first appeared with urban boom of the early nineteenth century. At that time these tensions found their characteristic outlets in workers unions. Now riches and poverty are separated into distant enclaves within vast metropolitan regions, and class conflicts appear in the rivalry of economic factions for special advantages within the system of welfare capitalism of the federal government. The American city remains, as in the nineteenth century, the preeminent place of class contrast, but in the current national and international economy of the United States the city is no longer the place where relief can be sought.