Regulatory regimes and the environmental implications of sustainability-based governance of extralegal buildings: Comparing the Taichung and Kaohsiung policies

A trend of flexible, place-specific regulatory strategies prevails in both the domestic and international urban policies governing urban informality. Yet, it remains unclear in what ways these various policies can address the issues of precariousness and unsafety of squatter settlement in terms of reducing the economic and environmental externalities through active intervention from the states. Drawing upon the theory of urban sustainability fix, thispaperanalyzes two sets of urban governance models combining urban planning, architectural management on top of sustainable science and technology. Research methods are archival research and content analyses of planning and architectural legislations along with political discourses. The analyses findthatTaichung, in its active quest for real estate development, enactednew planning legislations grounding the transfer of floor areas and the temporal and geographical divisionasthe main strategiesgoverning extralegal residential buildings. In so doing, the municipality establishes the exchange mechanism between urban green space and unlicensed floor areas as a way to reduce the environmental and economic externalities caused by informality. Under the pressing demands of economic restructuring, Kaohsiungcity government incorporates solar energy systems and vertical greeneryinto its regulatory regimesof extralegal residential buildings through developing new and renewed architectural codes as well as building management schemes. Both cities strategically incorporate specific environmental technologies and discourses as their “sustainability fix” to balance the economic, environmental and social concerns. This has allowed both cities tolessenenvironmental externalities of informality, continuing their legacy of tolerating urban informality, and in the meantime, seeking new development opportunitiesin the face of industrial and economic restructuring. The pro-environment urban policies in both cities discursively construct extralegal buildings and squatter settlements as something that could be worked into the entrepreneurial urban contexts.