TRANSFORMING TREASURE HILL: Socially produced landscapes, the politics of land, and value contestation
Part Of
The Politics of Land And Value: Case Studies from Across the Globe
Start Page
172
End Page
193
ISBN (of the container)
9781040506943
9781032742151
ISBN
9781040506943
9781032742151
Date Issued
2026-01-01
Author(s)
Abstract
In 2011, the Taipei City Government officially designated Treasure Hill as the city’s first-ever heritage preservation settlement - an extraordinary turn of events for the collectively built informal community that the local authority had repeatedly threatened to demolish since its origins in the late 1960s. In this chapter, we situate the transformation of Treasure Hill in two competing value logics of land. The first is a social and collective logic that has been part and parcel of residents’ material subsistence, urban living, and human plenitude. The other is an economic and commodified logic that has driven the entrenched politics of the city’s entrepreneurial turn to urban redevelopment. Informed by Robert Lake’s pragmatic argument that value is an intentional strategy deployed to contest a problematic situation, we examine how community planners and residents have come to use historical landscape preservation as an “aesthetic fix” to the existential threats of demolition and in-situ housing demand. Value contestation is an inspirational and transformational mode of practice, as the case of Treasure Hill has shown, yet there is no blueprint for how to carry it out. Through ethnographic details, this case study sheds important light on the broader question of how to productively contest the entrenched politics of land while paying careful attention to the contingency and fallibility of planning actions and practices.
Publisher
Taylor and Francis
Type
book part