Gong-Guan╱Wing-Raw-Den：The Struggle for Place Identities of Contemporary Cultured Class
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Hsu, Szu-Yun
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
Since the development of National Taiwan University in 1928, Gong-Guan, located at the city centre of Taipei, has been regarded as a place with significant cultural disposition and liberal tendency. In the 1990s, the area around National Taiwan University has become a magnate for not-for-profit organizations, independent bookstores and cafes. Such place with charming streetscapes and hybrid cultures has consequently turned into a favorite destination in Taiwan for intellectuals and cultural elites.
For a long time, the cultured class has held a special place identity towards Gong Guan. Nevertheless, in 2004, the ‘cultural landscape planning project’ initiated by planning professionals created a new place identification ‘Wing-Raw-Den’ to redefine their own sense of place. It attempts to absorb progressive rhetoric such as ‘public sphere’, ‘heterogeneous space’, ‘resistant site’ and ‘earthly utopia’ to demonstrate their place identity as a whole. As a result, grounded on critical cultural geography, this research tries to problematize such assumed place identity among these groups to discover the multiple layers in the place and identity constructing process with social, spatial and historical aspects.
The first part of the thesis initially deals with the plentiful place representations. Through textual analysis, it reviews the varied place meanings defined by different groups through time. Furthermore, it analyses the prevalent place images of ‘resistant site’ and ‘Western-like café society’ by revealing its’ politics of representation. Through such analytical process, it deconstructs how the place is being projected as nostalgia and modern in time and juxtaposed between East and West in space.
The latter part of the work focuses on the individual agents and cultural communities who practice their lifestyles in Gong-Guan/Wen-Raw-Den and transformed it to their own relational space. Moreover, this research tries to distinguish the exclusiveness accompany with the identity constructing process, and how the place gradually became a field to perform specific habitus of the cultured class. Subsequently, it poses the problems and risks the prevailing attitude to regard Gong-Guan/Wen-Raw-Den as a multi-cultural and tolerable place may arouse.
Finally, I will investigate how the agents’ place identities change with their life process. By examining their acting subject construction projects, we have the chance to comprehend how Gong-Guan/Wen-Raw-Den works as a symbolic place through their journey to pursue an ‘alternative self’, and then being sublated by the agents themselves.
Subjects
地方認同
公館
溫羅汀
place identity
Gong-Guan
Wing-Raw-Den
cultured class
Type
thesis
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