Straddling Between Attachment and Disembeddedness: A Research on Place-Identity in Bao-Tzang-Yen Village (Treasure Hill), Taipei

Located in the margin of the city, Treasure Hill was a settlement formatted by the way of self –help building. In more than ten years, the place has been menaced by enforced relocation from the Taipei City Government. Later, the planning and architectural professionals also aroused the preservation movement of the settlement and finally made it assigned as a Historical Settlement with the Cultural Heritage Preservation Law and preserved it in the form of an Art Village. In the process, the close geographical character of Treasure Hill has been turned to open. The continual influences from the outlanders not only changed the life but future of the settlement. They also competed with the residents of the right of space and the meaning of the place.
Approached from observing the residents’s daily life in Treasure Hill and tracking the living history of the whole settlement, this research tried to digged out the place-identity of the residents, which was developed on the base of living in the “illegal” building. At the meanwhile, I tried to comprehend the interrelation between place- identity and self- identity. The research also focused on how the environmental past of living in the self-help buildings acted on the construction of the place-identity and the meaning of place belong to an individual. The research has found the impacts left by the environmental past of living in Treasure Hill mainly work on the paradoxical psychology of management of the environment and the attachment to the land. The subject encounters conflicts between identification and practice when managed living environment because she/he took a transitional and tentative attitude. The residents felt anxious during the process when the meaning of home and place- identity emboded because of being restricted.
External forces frequently change the space, reshape the landscape, and demolish important sites of memory and living scenes However, the drastic changes of landscape are just as the fractions of the space, that make the residents suffer the loss of place. They always feel unable to control the environment, and bearing the threaten of enforced relocated. Even though now Treasure Hill is registered as a Historical Settlement Architecture, the residents still have to worry about the rightness of their stay. They could not imagine the future of the place, and could not believe in an enduring life environment, either. They often feel uneasy. The oppressions in the political process, and the complexities of the illegal/self-help building actually disembedded the emotions of subjects to the place and thus diluted the sense of place.
Concerning the residents living in the field under highly social discrimination and the imagination of stigma, the research calls for more detailed observations of local life and analysis of everyday life. Because the subject’s performances of place-identity are relevant of sensitive management of individule image, adjustment of stigma and judgement of personal political identity based on the right to stay, the method in the research taken was mainly participatory observation. By the mutual assess of the neighborhood, I tried to recognize the lines between different groups and the plurality and diversity of the residents in the settlement. In my analysis, I tried to comprehend and compare the immanence of their identity, the interaction mode in the neighborhood and their social distances between each other based on their mutual demarcation and evaluation on one hand.
On the other hand, my observation also focused on the diverse people and events gragually involved in the settlement which stimulated the residents’s specified reactions. The research found the residents keep their own special attitudes facing the outlanders. They usually make comparison with their own neighbors to clarify the rightness for staying in their own house by blaming other illegal squatters. Those conversations are not unconsciously naggings or gossip, but of specified purposes; that is to combat for their dwelling right, to strive for their identity and to adjust the stigma put on them. Through judging other neighbors to separate themselves from the stigma or moral evaluation of others, they achieve the purpose of consolidating self- identification.
While those planners or student teams executed building or planning projects in community, new public sphere was built on the space. The space that was “belong to” private before is given public meanings nowadays. Not only part of the representational meanings of the space was transformed, but also the residents performed new behavior. They also reformatted their recognition of the neighborhood. A good example could be given by the influences brought by the gaze of the citizens, which were introduced by the art events during the planning process of the art village. The gaze from outsiders cast a lens of gentrification and romantic thoughts about the progressive resistant movement from the grassroot. This had made residents to notice the change of the gaze from the society. The residents regard the outlander’s involvement in their life as a mirror, so that they might change their perspectives to themselves, and review the outlanders as well. The place is both a living field and a carrier bearing alternative meanings of urban history and representational esthetics. The phenomenon made the residents change their thinking of the representational meanings of space and place-identity. It resulted in different outcomes and modes, however, when different individuals have their own transforming state of their place- identity in different conditions.
A role as “Other” was identified collectively when the residents observed the opponent from outside in competing for the right of the settlement space and the meanings of place. In the face of the heterogeneous other, they acted for reflective self-gaze and adjustment of stigma label more frequently. The entry of the outlanders compressed the spatial distance and thus resulted in the “intentional performance” played in the field of daily life/ back stage. Among their performances, mode of strong intentional one was especially developed for the right to stay. Nevertheless, it would be too simplified to comprehend their identity only as performances with the purpose of staying rights. We should not ignore that the reformation of place-identity was actually contributed to their transformation and consolidation of self-identity.