Dialectical Relationship between Creative Clusters and Residential Neighborhood-The Urban Landscape Restructuring of Taipei Minsheng Community
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Yang, Shang-Shan
Abstract
Minsheng Community is a master-planned residential community built in the era of US AID subsidy. It is considered as one of the most livable neighborhoods in Taipei following the State New Town and Neighborhood Unit development model of the US, and has been drawing in many middle-class residents owing to its green infrastructure and modernist walk-up flat density. However, in the past decade, the urban landscape of Minsheng community has undergone tangible transformation. Idiosyncratic café and shops and small clusters of creative industry mushroom along the streets and alleys, and evolve with the lush foliage into an abundant creative milieu and a unique consumer experience. This thesis analyzes the process of Minsheng Community’s spatial re-structuring and the dialectical relationship between the residential neighborhood and creative cluster, and contends that the creative milieu is the major factor for the clustering of creative industry. The ‘green’ environmental value is the common denominator of the original middle class residents and the new middle class, yet such bourgeoisie value and limited spectrum of cultural inclusion indirectly hinder the diversified development of creative industry and divest its necessary nutrition of subculture. Cultural pluralism of a living community, under such circumstances, may be replaced by a single value of creative cluster. On the other hand, the ""commercialization"" of cultural and creative industries caters to the consumption modes of the creative class. Through design of originality and creativity, the creative industry manipulates the production-consumption relationship into ""monopoly rent"", and in the meanwhile boosts up the real estate value of its associated spaces. Despite that gentrification has not yet brought forth an irreversible impact on the demographic structure of Minsheng Community’s original residents, it has somehow driven out the retail and community businesses. Under the guise of brand-scape and urban tourism embedded in local communities, Neoliberalism has been restructuring the community landscape in the name of creative cluster. The inclusion and exclusion of Minsheng Community’s creative cluster also respond to the issues of zoning conflicts of implanting creative businesses into residential communities, especially when Taipei has accordingly won the title of World Design Capital of 2016. What is the essence of ‘creativity’? Is it the consumption experiences derived from the shops with an intentional design ‘feel’ or a creative network of grassroots activism? Reviewing the dialectical relationship between the residential community and the creative industry, the author argues that a creative cluster needs to embrace the openness and emancipatory power of both social and cultural sustainabilities.
Subjects
creative cluster
cultural economy
monopoly rents
gentrification
SDGs
Type
thesis
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