Radical Commoning of an Aged House in Tainan: Building Lang Cheyn Shin Machine Works Factory as Urban Commons

Tainan City has been undergoing waves of adaptive reuses of aged houses without the recognition of cultural heritage. Designers and spatial programmers employ various reuse approaches and exhibit a pluralistic assortment of revitalization; however, behind the facade of functional diversity the underlying fixed set of commodity values fail to provide real groundbreaking emancipatory effects. On the other hand, the concept of urban commons has begun to emerge in Taiwanese society over the last few years, mostly in the form of shared spaces or co-working spaces, creating alternative ways of using space. This thesis intends to survey the trend of Tainan’s adaptive reuses of aged buildings and to appropriate the concepts of urban commons and communing to explore new options and opportunities of spatial reprogramming. The particular case of the Lang Cheyn Shin (LCS) Factory is chosen for further engaged research.   The researcher employs the institutional ethnography approach, personally entering the everyday life of the LCS Factory and writing episodes of inter-subjective interactions into a commoning narrative, via which the reader is also guided through the LCS Factory’s commoning process. The researcher’s deliberation of his own contradictions of self-doubt and carnivalesque emotions when working collectively in the urban commons reveals the boundary between the radical practices of the LCS Factory and the social norms that have shaped himself and the society in general. Through the ritual and the habitual, dialogue, events, collaboration, and collective living of the communing practices, the researcher transcended the spatial and social boundaries of the radical commons to be recognized as a semi-member of the LCS Factory. Yet the researcher’s critical distance theorizes the urban commons as a liminal space of in-betweenness and urban experiments for a more sustainable and socially just living, and the evolving “relations” and localized practices of the urban commons further envision a radical and emancipatory society.