Appropriate Arcade: Urban Governance and Everyday Politics in Kaohsiung

The aim of this paper is to examine the mutual relationship between governance and everyday politics of the arcade life in Kaohsiung City.
Arcade is part of people’s dwelling; it is a special architect style often seen in Taiwan. Though the law protects the public use of the arcade, the space is appropriated by the owner of the dwelling. It presents the conflict between the public and the private. This paper explores how city government negotiates with the users of arcade when enforcing the policy, and how these users using the space of arcade as well as reacting with the policy.
Based on three cases, it shows that there are three types of governance and everyday use/ politics. For urban government, the policy could focus on the history story, the life style, or the business profit, which develop as Historical governance, Aesthetic governance, and Business governance. With the help of the concept of Governmentality, this essay also examine the regime of governance (including the examination of fields of visibility of government, the technical aspect of government, the episteme of the government, and the formation of identities).
This essay also provides the observation of and interview with daily users, trying to pointing out how people in Taiwan appropriate the space of arcade. The negotiation within themselves, and the reaction to the policy government enforced, it then creates the everyday politics, which may affect the government’s policy. There’s also three type of everyday politic in the arcade: the politeness, the regulation, and the mutual.
However, this research in the ends points out that the cooperation of policy and the everyday politics actually leads to the privatizing of the place, and it turns out denying some people, such as vagrants and the bag people, to use the arcade.