The publicness debate and boundary dialectics of Toad Hill informal settlement
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lin, Yu-Wen
Abstract
Located at the periphery of the Taipei basin and surrounded by the natural preserve, the Toad Hill settlement has been sustaining an organic and vital living inside the bustling city. Under the pressure of urban redevelopment and implementation of the predetermined urban plan, an activist group initiated the settlement conservation movement. This research adopts the political-economic perspective to analyze the historical processes and social relations of the informal settlement, with special emphasis on the dialectics of its public value. The other concern of the study is to identify the boundary effect between the settlement and the city regarding the spatial, social, and planning context, as well as the socio-spatial tension inside the settlement, while recognizing the daily transgressing activities across the boundaries. The political-economy analysis reveals the structural context of the settlement’s morphological transformation. From the Qing imperial, Japanese colonial, and the Nationalist period of governance, multiple layers of history are juxtaposed on a settlement scale subjugated to garrison, agricultural, and military impacts. During the post-War urbanization period, the informal settlement sprawling around the Japanese bungalow and the military-dependent housing diminished the state crisis of the housing deficit, and the self-help and self-built squatter village ironically represented an alternative mode of “publicness.” The disfranchised residents and the informal settlement symbolize the counterpublics who may redefine the meaning of public and the politics of representation of the public realm. Re-investigating the public and semi-public spaces of the settlement, it is clear that their production and maintenance are “negotiated” by the residents on daily basis. In contrast to the designated public spaces from top-down decision-making, the bottom-up approach exhibits an alternative mechanism of planning in a settlement scale. The boundary dialectics in Toad Hill conveys the dynamics of changing social relations, and in the public-private contention, boundaries are constantly shifting between the residents’ clustered living spaces. Each cluster boundary is tacitly recognized by a territorial identity, which has emerged from a distinctive historical process of migration. Different spatial clusters of the Toad Hill settlement merge with each other over time and through community activities. While the intervention of the contemporary zoning disintegrates the settlement’s overall sense of place and triggers impending crisis of partial demolition, the subsequent conservation action and political negotiations open up the settlement boundary bordering the city yet increase the tension between different shareholders and stakeholders of the settlement. The publicness debates and the boundary dialectics influence each other. Residents from different territorial clusters interact in the community square through the habitual and the ritual as well as the intentional community-building activities related to conservation. Therefore, the daily-life performances and initiated activities not only dissolve the cluster boundaries but also re-publicized the public space. The conservation movement further propels the de-territorialization and re-territorialization process, and since the social and physical boundaries become more and more porous, it is possible to reconstruct new social relations and re-inscribe contemporary identity to the place. In other words, within the boundary dialectics, the publicness of the informal settlement is continuously contended and contested.
Subjects
Toad Hill settlement
informal settlement
publicness
boundary
SDGs
Type
thesis
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