FROM ECONOMISM TO CULTURE WAR: A Labor Culture Movement Under The Old Industrial Estate Regeneration
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
Shen, Chang-Chen
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
During the period when Taiwan was colonized and industrialized under the governance of Japan, many traditional industrial districts took place along the railway and the suburban area of Taipei. When highly urban development and regional economic restructuring occurred under the influence of globalization, the closure of factories and the pursuit of the benefit by land exploiting caused labor regime disadvantageous to the labor. In the meanwhile, the circumstance that cultural strategies played a more significant role in the agenda of urban redevelopment than before created a new opportunity for labor movement. It made the traits of labor movement transform from “economism”, which focuses on material and economic affairs, into “culture war”, which makes a lot of contention for meanings and interpretations.
The inquiries of this paper are why “culture” has played a more significant role in the agenda of urban redevelopment; how the culture battlefield opened by the urban culture agenda mediates the contention and negotiation of different actors like government, capital and the grassroots; and how the nature of labor movement transformed from economism into culture war.
The theoretical framework of this paper is the dynamics of political opportunity structure will effectively influence the development of social movement. This influence is the conjuncture of various contingent factors in the prevailing social conditions. This also has something to do with the dynamics of the actors and their own development. That is the development of agency itself. The momentum of agency comes from their creatively appropriating, transforming, and reinventing the cultural codes accumulated from the past under many contexts. It also comes from the historical trajectories of the agency’s development itself.
Based on the above viewpoints, this paper first reviews the social history contexts of the urban redevelopment of Taipei which points out that urban culture agenda was considered to be contributive to the city marketing and capital accumulation in the late 1990s. The urban culture agenda can also be responsive to the requests of citizen participation and old district redevelopment. So the city government actively draws private capital into the repair and management of historical buildings and cultural facilities under the national constraint of political and fiscal structure. Although the cultural-spatial agenda has the characteristics of pro-growth and mainstream cultural pluralism, it also opens a new resistant space for labor movement. Secondly, this paper uses the case study of Shilin Paper Mill [士林紙廠] redevelopment project to see how actors of the labor movement appropriate the accumulated culture codes and labor habitus developed from past labor movements. To a further step, it investigates how these practices dynamically interact with the open political opportunity structures. Finally, this paper tries to specify the emerging significance of cultural politics in labor movement nowadays.
Subjects
都市再發展
勞工運動
士林紙廠
political opportunity structure
cultural politics
urban redevelopment
Shilin Paper Mill
labor movement
SDGs
Type
thesis
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