Article
Entrepreneurialising urban informality: Transforming governance of informal settlements in Taipei
Urban Studies 1–17 Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0042098017726739 journals.sagepub.com/home/usj
Ker-hsuan Chien National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Abstract Informality is a common urban experience among cities in the Global South. Given the thin social welfare and weak regulations, the urban subaltern has therefore had to improvise housing and employment in order to survive. Urban informality is hence conceived as a negotiation process through which spatial value is produced. However, under the current wave of urban entrepreneurialisation, informality is often deemed to be inefficient and unproductive in the new economy that the local governments are trying to build. Many of the informal settlements have been subject to demolition in order to make room for new urban development projects. With the cases of waterfront regeneration projects in Taipei, this paper argues that entrepreneurialism and informality are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, through their co-evolution, urban informality actually contributes to the variegation of urban entrepreneurialism. This paper demonstrates how the urban squatters have managed to re-engage informality and urban development by actively participating in the shaping of the entrepreneurial discourses, reinventing their informal settlements as a key feature that contributes to the city’s economic development. However, although this entwining of entrepreneurialism and informality has brought new opportunities to the informal settlements, it has at the same time presented new threats to their current way of life. By focusing on the entrepreneurialising of urban informality, this paper offers a grounded perspective on the ways in which the urban subaltern has reacted to the unfolding urban entrepreneurialism in Taiwan. Keywords entrepreneurialism, Global South, Taiwan, urban informality, urban redevelopment, urbanisation and developing countries
Corresponding author: Ker-hsuan Chien, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei City 10617, Taiwan. Email:
[email protected]
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Introduction In recent years the concept of urban informality has been discussed comprehensively in urban studies. To postcolonial urban theorists (Robinson, 2016; Roy, 2016), studying the formation and evolving process of urban informality is not only an addition to empirical cases in the understanding of urban formation, but it also offers us a grounded perspective from the Global South cities. Since it focuses on what struggling people go through in order to survive, it illuminates our understanding of contemporary urban subaltern lives. The focus of urban informality offers a way to conceptualise the delicate interaction between local housing demand, urban governance, local knowledge of negotiating with urban regulations, and most importantly, the creative methods which people use to cope with the neoliberalising urban development (Ascensa˜o, 2016; Erman, 2016; McFarlane, 2012a; Yeo et al., 2012). In these cases, informality under urban development is more than a subject of oppression and exclusion, it is also an active agent capable of co-shaping and cocultivating the urban reality that is being
lived in. Examining different forms of urban informality therefore contributes to the variegated understanding of urbanisation and subaltern conditions under neoliberal urban transition. Informality has been a part of Taipei’s urban life throughout its development. Informal settlements have always been crucial facilities that absorb newcomers, fostering the urban subaltern given the city’s thin welfare system. However, since informal settlements have been deemed inefficient and chaotic in relation to modern sanitation and public safety standards, they have also often been subject to control, reformed (formalised), or demolished under new urban development plans. This paper aims to bring this conversation into the discussion of entrepreneurial urbanism, exploring the impact that entrepreneurialism has had on Taipei’s urban informality, especially informal settlements. With the case of Taipei’s waterfront regeneration project, this paper demonstrates how people in urban informal settlements managed to retain their houses by participating in the shaping of entrepreneurial discourses.
Chien In order to keep living in the same place, they reinvented their informal settlements as a key feature that would contribute to the city’s economic development. This paper is based on research I conducted in 2011 and 2012. During this period, squatters along the Liu-Gong channel and some from the Xi-Jou tribe were working with planning experts from National Taiwan University (hereafter NTU) against local government plans to demolish the informal houses for waterfront rehabilitation. I carried out 21 interviews, including ones with squatters, local residents, local government officers, and planning experts from NTU to see what discourse was employed in the waterfront renovation project, and how squatters and local people were responding to the renovation project. The interviews were conducted in Chinese and later translated into English by the author. This paper begins with a brief introduction to its main scope. In the second part, I specify what I mean by entrepreneurialisation and urban informality through reviewing previous works on these two issues. I also elaborate on how urban entrepreneurialism and urban informality intertwine, becoming a co-producing force that shapes the urban landscape. In the third part, this paper illustrates how entrepreneurialism gradually made its way to Taiwan and was translated into Taipei’s urban policy. In the fourth section, this paper stresses how this entrepreneurialisation of urban informal settlements has reshaped the way of life in informal settlements, and transformed the local informality. In conclusion, I argue that entrepreneurialising urban informality should not be understood as a solution for the social exclusion led by urban entrepreneurialism. Rather, it offers a closer look at the variegated forms of urban entrepreneurialisation, and new ways to conceptualise the local issues caused by the encounter of informality and entrepreneurialism.
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Urban informality and entrepreneurial urbanism The discussions on entrepreneurial urbanism over the last two decades have provided different approaches to urban transition in cities worldwide. Along with economic globalisation, cities are competing with each other for the role of key strategic node of ‘command and control’ in the global urban network (Sassen, 2001). New types of urban space production are also spreading rapidly across cities. Entrepreneurial city therefore became the common urban strategy for the spatial restructuring to cope with economic globalisation. Urban governments thus evolve accordingly to be more innovative and entrepreneurial to attract the flows of capital and talents (Harvey, 1989). Urban strategies such as urban renewal and place making were also employed to create location-specific advantages, making cities more suitable for living and consuming (Jessop and Sum, 2000). Under this urban space restructuring, concerns about social exclusion have also been raised. With new partnerships formed by local governments and private investors, urban spaces have been reclaimed by global capital and tourists in the name of urban regeneration (Smith, 2002). As a result, people such as squatters, homeless people, beggars and prostitutes were systematically excluded from this consumerist landscape. In this sense, urban regeneration is the embodiment of gentrification. A revanchist city became the urban policy widely adopted in European and North American cities to gain their advantages in global capital circulation (MacLeod, 2002; Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Along with the policy transferring between cities (McCann and Ward, 2011), this new form of urban space production has become a common issue across cities around the world (Lees, 2012). Under the circumstances, comparative urbanism has been proposed to
4 recontextualise the encounter and mutate between the mobile entrepreneurial urban policy and local political economy (Harris, 2008; McFarlane, 2010). Urban informality therefore offers a subaltern perspective on entrepreneurial urbanism. Urban informality is often comprehended in two ways. From the perspective of private ownership, squatters were people who have no private ownership of the properties they live in. This lack of legal entitlement makes the informal houses ‘dead capital’, leaving the squatters with little access to capital market (De Soto, 2000). Nevertheless, given the complex effect legalisation may bring, legalising informal properties does very little for alleviating poverty (Durand-Lasserve and Selod, 2009; Gilbert, 2002; Payne et al., 2009). From the planning point of view, urban informality is construed to be an idiom of urbanisation, through which the differential spatial value is produced (Roy and AlSayyad, 2004). Since informality is often understood as the dwelling without planning apparatus, it indicates a mode of grassroots urbanisation, providing a downto-earth perspective of the local struggle of poverty and inequality (Roy, 2005). Such elucidation of local agency makes informality instrumental to subaltern study. Given that the power relation and local norms from the megacities are often different from the urban experiences from the West, scrutinising these local nuances may shed new light on urban studies (Roy, 2011). By stressing the agency local people exhibit in their daily encounters with local construction rules, or their entrepreneurial practices to extricate themselves from poverty, we can therefore move beyond the stereotypical understanding toward cities of the Global South. This overstepping ‘limits of archival and ethnographic recognition’ (Roy, 2011: 223) could foster new epistemological and methodological understanding toward urban (see Schindler, 2014). Roy (2011) therefore
Urban Studies 00(0) marks the subaltern production of urban space as subaltern urbanism, bringing the idea of subaltern to the realm of urban studies. Yet, though Roy (2011) employs slums as the main ‘itinerary’ of subaltern urban space, Schindler (2014) argues that other urban spaces should not be precluded from qualifying as subaltern urban space. By casting slums as one in the many forms of subaltern urban space, subaltern urbanism thus can be broadened into a comparative investigation between the North–South divide, thinking urban space in terms of subaltern/ non-subaltern meshwork. Urban informality therefore can be applied as a conceptual tool for elucidating the political agencies of subaltern urban life. In light of their work, McFarlane (2012b) argued against thinking about informality in territorial terms, regarding informal settlements merely as a space excluded by urban entrepreneurialism. Instead, urban informality could be understood as a local agency contributing to diverse trajectories of entrepreneurial urbanism. Focusing on the coproduction of urban entrepreneurialism between global institutions, local states, civil society activists, and the informal settlements in Mumbai, McFarlane (2012a) delineated how the entrepreneurial urbanism has reformed to include the urban poor. In this sense, urban informality is a path to understanding how risk-taking, self-managing minorities co-produce entrepreneurialisation with the urban elite, and how new techniques and models are forged through variegated forms of entrepreneurialisation. This paper therefore aims to delineate how urban informality, especially informal settlements, co-produces entrepreneurial urbanism with the state, and with planning experts. Urban informality is often overthrown by entrepreneurialising urban policy. As urban informality was a spontaneous effort made by local people to improve their living conditions, the unmethodical construction or
Chien flexible employment can seem to be disorganised, or even chaotic. These characters make them appear primitive and counterproductive, which makes the informality incongruous with the state’s vision of a modernised city, and therefore should be reformed by state power. In previous cases in Africa, Asia and Latin America, we have seen urban informal settlements denied access to infrastructural services, such as water, electricity, public transportation, (Desai et al., 2015; Graham and McFarlane, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001; McFarlane, 2008), or being subjected to formalisation, upgrading or demolition by new regeneration projects (Desai and Loftus, 2013; Erman, 2016; Ghertner, 2008; Harris, 2008). Urban informality appears to be rather vulnerable to the entrepreneurial urban development, especially via the measure of urban regeneration. However, in certain cases urban informality and entrepreneurialism have grown into each other, co-forming the contemporary urban landscape. In the case of the informal marketplace in Singapore, the informal night-time economy became an incubator for small businesses started mainly by new immigrants, providing easy access to the market for new enterprises and a hospitable environment for migrant workers. In short, they provide urban migrants with a new chance to thrive in this world city (Yeo and Heng, 2014; Yeo et al., 2012). In Lisbon, the informal settlements gradually developed as different waves of migrants from the country’s former colonies settled in the city. As time elapsed these informal settlements became an urban assemblage of squatters and their low-fi living conditions. Although this urban assemblage did provide roofs over heads and social networks for the migrants to survive urban life, the basic architectural forms and the shaming of slums also made the squatters vulnerable to sickness and difficult for them to find decent jobs (Ascensa˜o, 2016). In Northern Ankara, this human agency is also shown in the re-
5 informalisation of the middle class-oriented apartments via the dwellers’ everyday practices of gathering, cooking, and fluffing carpets in the public spaces. This reinformalisation also creates new conflicts between the squatter practices and the modern, middle-class lifestyle that the social housing project was seeking in the first place (Erman, 2016). The focus on human agency in urban informality distinguishes the resilience of the urban subaltern, which seems to always manage to negotiate a way to more living spaces and a more flexible management system under tightened urban regulations. In order to further scrutinise how exactly the squatters’ agency functions in the urban entrepreneurial project, this paper stresses the interactions between the globalised urban entrepreneurialism and the local agency of Taipei’s squatters. With the cases of Taipei’s waterfront redevelopment project and the local squatters’ resistance for relocation, this paper focuses on a few questions. How was urban entrepreneurialism employed by the local government as its urban strategy? How do the squatters interpret and react to such urban transformation? What kind of impact has this urban entrepreneurialism had on Taipei’s informality? And how does this urban entrepreneurialism variegate upon its encounter with urban informality? Before further discussion, in the next section I explain how informality became a part of Taipei’s urban life, and how this informality and urban entrepreneurialism were first regarded as mutually exclusive in urban development.
Informality in entrepreneurialising Taipei Urban informality has existed since Taipei’s rapid post-war urbanisation back in the 1960s. Since the local government was unable to provide sufficient urban housing, the local administration had to let the
6 informal building issue slide. Therefore, informal settlement became a common solution for the lack of urban housing to the urban poor, especially the migrants from mainland China after the Chinese Civil War in 1949 (a.k.a. mainlanders) and the urban migrants. In order to fit themselves into the urban life, people improvised under the circumstances. Informal houses were built on the unused waterfronts and parklands so people could afford to live in the city. Throughout the urbanisation process, the urban informality in Taiwan evolved into variety of forms, accommodating people from different economic statuses and social backgrounds. Shanty towns were built to shelter the mainlanders and urban migrants with low income; informal extensions to formal constructions were built so that people could have additional rooms to use in the densely packed city. By the 1990s, the informal constructions had become a common urban experience, a way of living in Taipei. However, this form of urban informality was not unregulated. In order to stop the informal buildings from further increase, a new policy was announced in 1995 to tackle the issue. In the ‘Direction Regarding Illegal Construction Management’ announced by Taipei City Government, all the unlicensed new constructions would be demolished immediately once reported. As for the informal constructions built before 1994, they would be demolished only if they were threatening public safety, breaching the public sanitation code, or were at odds with the new urban plan. This new law could be construed as a local policy to cope with urban entrepreneurialism. Since Taiwan was undergoing an economic transition under globalisation in the 1990s, the Taiwanese government therefore actively intervened in Taipei’s development, aiming to make Taipei a hub of capital and product flows in East and South East Asia (Hsu, 2005). In order to make the city more competitive in terms of
Urban Studies 00(0) physical infrastructures and environment for investment, the city was undergoing spatial restructuring (Chou, 2005). Financial liberalisation and public–private partnership were thus introduced to urban governance, along with the implementation of urban renewal plans and urban megaprojects (Wang, 2004). With new CBDs planned, roads widened, and sewage pipes unfolded, private capital was channelled to urban spaces to facilitate urban redevelopment. Given that shanty towns and encroachments were often built in public spaces such as reserved parkland and waterfront, the urban regeneration ended up enveloping the revanchist urbanism that reclaimed urban spaces from the squatters (Jou et al., 2016). Therefore, the new law launched to regulate informal constructions could be understood a policy tool to outlaw the informal buildings that were incompatible with Taipei’s new entrepreneurial strategy. The existence of squatter settlements was problematised as an obstruction of urban redevelopment, a deficiency that needed to be rectified, or eliminated. This policy-led urban regeneration plan combined with the newly launched illegal construction management rule made the informal buildings extremely vulnerable to demolition. The eviction of informal settlement in the reserved parklands fourteen and fifteen in 1997, for instance, was one significant case in the conflict between the city’s entrepreneurial policy and informality. This informal buildings agglomeration consisted of more than 900 informal buildings with roughly 2000 squatters, accommodating mainlanders and urban migrants since the urbanisation of the 1970s. As this informal settlement was situated in the old urban centre, it soon became a clear target for demolition under the city’s regeneration plan of 1997. To the then mayor, the demolition of the informal buildings was essential for Taipei to become attractive to the global talent and capital flow:
Chien In a wealthy city like Taipei, this [community] is the tumour of the city, the shame of citizens. It is unimaginable that right next to the world famous Regent Taipei Hotel are more than a thousand people living in a graveyard. (United Daily News, 10 November 1996).
To the local government at that time, informal settlements represented the city’s disorganisation and inefficiency, and were illfitted to the entrepreneurial city that Taipei was eager to become. In order to make the city more attractive to foreign investment, the issue of informality had to be contained. This is to say that informality was recognised as unsuitable for the entrepreneurial urbanism, and therefore had to be eliminated. However, this antagonism was later transformed through the co-production of entrepreneurial urban policy, local communities and planning experts. Although the informal settlements were often considered to be incompatible with the urban entrepreneurialising projects, and were relocated and demolished in these projects, this form of exclusion also triggered a new wave of rising local entrepreneurship. In response to the demand for a more enticing metropolitan area, the local communities started actively participating in the making of entrepreneurial Taipei. In the following sections, I demarcate how waterfront regeneration is employed by Taipei County as an entrepreneurial strategy for urban development, and how two communities – Liu-Gong informal settlement and Xi-Jou tribe – have coevolved with urban entrepreneurialism.
Entrepreneurialising urban informality River County project: Taipei County’s waterfront regeneration The ‘River County’ project served as Taipei County’s spatial restructuring to facilitate
7 Taipei’s entrepreneurialisation. Since county waterfronts were normally neglected spaces, occupied by illegal factories and informal settlements, they have been targeted to be renovated and prettified, as a way to attract capital investment and tourists to the county. As the aforementioned case of informal settlement in the reserved parklands fourteen and fifteen in 1997, informal settlements were soon problematised under such entrepreneurial urban policy. The informal houses along the Liu-Gong channel were built along the one-time irrigation system. Given that the channel flows along a military camp, the Liu-Gong channel informal house occupiers therefore mostly consisted of mainlanders who came with the Chiang Kai-Shek regime after the Chinese Civil War. Since many mainlander-veterans were discharged without proper housing plans or with only a small pension, they had to improvise in order to survive. Therefore, some of these veterans ended up dwelling along the small space between the Liu-Gong channel and the Zhong-Xin military camp. Over years, this informal settlement became an agglomeration of people who could not afford housing in the private housing market. Through urbanisation, the channel had been turned into urban drainage and had become heavily polluted. Therefore, in 2005, Taipei County Government decided to renovate the channel, making the waterfront more efficient for the local government, as a part of the county’s redevelopment plan, the ‘River County’ project. As informal houses were not licenced constructions, they were normally excluded from the sewerage system. The informal settlement was thus conveniently problematised for both sanitary and economic reasons, being shamed for discharging sewerage into the channel and remaining an eyesore for the county. Fu-Te is the borough chief of the Hsin-De neighbourhood, where the informal settlement is
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situated. Like many people in the city, he attributed the deterioration of the Liu-Gong channel directly to the informal settlement:
environment, but also their houses would worth a lot more and being much easier to sell.
The neighbourhood by now has mostly connected to the sewerage system, only the front ones [meaning the informal houses] were left out. [.] Some of the houses even have no septic tank, so the sewerage just goes straight to the channel.
By engaging the unfolding of sewerage systems with the economic incentive of realestate growth, the River County project became a hegemonic project among local property owners, forming a new consensus to revitalise the local economy through boosting the housing market. In order to ensure this renovation could be carried out smoothly, the local government thus employed the community planning system to engage the local people into the renovation project. The community planning system was introduced in Taiwan in the 1980s as the government’s penetration to the local society. Along with the democratisation and neoliberalisation of Taipei’s urban governance, the community planning system has been professionalised, and has become a main measure for authorities to negotiate with local communities (Huang and Hsu, 2011). These community planners are usually from academic backgrounds, trained by the government programme and licensed. Under the community planning scheme, the community planners are expected to have longterm partnerships with the local communities, so that they could propose proper community projects that would respond to local needs. Although the community planning projects are often local propositions to be reviewed and approved by the planning committee of the local governments, some projects, such as the Liu-Gong channel’s renovation, are directly contracted out by the government as a part of the urban development plan. This is when the community planners can be mobilised by government as a means of finding a way for its grand plan. In the case of Liu-Gong channel’s renovation, local meetings were held to explain how the renovation project might enhance the local environment, without fully disclosing
Held responsible for the channel’s pollution, urban informality is seen to be at odds with modern sanitation standards, and therefore must be demolished for the waterfront renovation to unfold. As a civil servant in the Urban and Rural Development Department pointed out in an interview: If we don’t demolish the informal settlement, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish what we’ve envisioned [for this channel].
In this way, the demolition of the informal settlement was directly engaged with the channel’s renovation, encompassing both sanitation and development reasons. This engagement rendered the demolition a technical issue for the waterfront renovation project, sequentially depoliticising the displacement it would inevitably lead to, since the squatters were unlikely to be able to afford other housing in the same neighbourhood. Being part of the County’s regeneration plan, this renovation project emphasises the revitalisation of the waterfront, instead of just the upgrading of the urban infrastructure. It aims to bring new investment, urban migrants and new job opportunities to the area, regenerating the local economy. As stated by another civil servant in the county government: Once the sewage was piped to the main system, you would stop smelling the stink almost immediately, and all the rats, roaches, and mosquitoes would be gone. They would not only be able to enjoy a better living
Chien the impact the project might have on local squatters. As a second-generation squatter Jing-Yi1 stated: When they told us they were going to renovate here in 2007, everyone was excited about it. We thought they were only planning to straighten the area, make it more beautiful. It wasn’t until they held the second meeting, mentioning about turning this area into a park, that we started to realise what this whole project is all about.
To the local government, rehabilitating the waterfront, and regenerating the local realestate development was its primary concern. The community planners were merely employed to ensure the government’s waterfront renovation could be carried out without problems. Given that the rehabilitation of the urban waterfront was deeply framed in the economic rationale of gaining Taipei County’s advantage in the competition for middle class urban migrants and investments, it overwhelmingly incorporated the middle class in the city, leaving local squatters alone facing demolition and possible displacement. However, although the waterfront renovation was expected to regenerate the area, it turned out that this was not the only proposal for local regeneration. In order to keep their homes in the waterfront, squatters started taking part in the shaping of the local development project. Rejecting their being shaped as an impediment for the local regeneration, the squatters instead reinvented themselves as a local attraction that would facilitate the county redevelopment.
Liu-Gong informal settlement as an historic site The Liu-Gong channel renovation project appeared as a top-down entrepreneurial project that aimed to regenerate the local economy. In this renovation project, the informal settlement was treated as a part of the
9 reason, if not the only one, for the bad shape of the Liu-Gong channel. Through combining the renovation with the local economic development, the renovation aimed to shape a subject that would prioritise local development, seeing the demolition of informal settlements as inevitable for both economic and sanitary reasons. In order to keep their homes, the squatters then organised a local movement to defend their way of life. JingYi became a main organiser of this movement. As many squatters were old veterans and their spouses, who were mostly over 70 years old by this time, they decided to take relatively mild action, petitioning to keep the informal settlement, instead of protesting against the renovation project. As Jing-Yi further explained: We avoid the word ‘protest’ in our movement. Since there were many seniors involved in this [movement], confronting [the local government] might be too onerous for them.
In order to keep their homes without direct confrontation with the local government, they decided to negotiate with the local government for sustenance of the community by re-shaping the local regeneration project. To sustain their dwellings along the waterfront, they re-joined urban informality with entrepreneurialism, strategically embracing urban entrepreneurialism, presenting themselves as living history, evidence of Taipei’s informality, so the value of their existence could be acknowledged. Using community planning as the channel, the informal settlement in 2011 counterproposed different versions of waterfront renovation, actively reincorporating the informal settlement into the urban entrepreneurialism to fit themselves into the new urban project. In the case of the informal houses along the Liu-Gong channel, they proposed the idea of turning the community into a cultural landscape. They argued that
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the informal houses along the Liu-Gong channel existed not only as a witness to Taipei’s urban development, but that their existence also added another layer to the city’s cultural essence, which could easily be cashed in on through the city’s real-estate and tourist development. To fit the community and the channel into the county government’s plan of water renovation, local people began to actively engage with the renovation project. Jing-Yi illustrated her vision for the channel in our interview: If we can separate the sewer [from the channel] and treat it, the channel should be a nice place, where we can enjoy the stream running beside us. [.] Sometimes when I walk along the alley, I do find the zigzag of the alley enjoyable. I notice there were some nostalgic trends going on, why can’t we keep the old houses, instead of tearing them down, while building new, fake ones?
By suggesting the connection of informal buildings to the sewerage system, Jing-Yi deconstructed the antagonistic relationship between urban sanitation/development and the sustaining of informal settlements. To Jing-Yi, renovation of the channel and the existence of the informal settlement were compatible. By subsuming the informal settlement as a part of the rehabilitation, not only would the urban waterscape be sanitised, but also the quirkiness of the informal buildings could at the same time offer more opportunities for tourism or real-estate development. Since the Liu-Gong channel community was formed over a long period, constructed entirely according to the needs of each individual household, the rustic, untidy appearance and the unmethodical clustering of the informal buildings were in drastic contrast with the modern congregate housing nearby. To Jing-Yi, it is this unique semblance of the informal settlement that should be considered as a part of the city’s
attraction, as a cultural, historic fac xade of modern Taipei. This style of building is not only peculiar in appearance, but it also shapes people’s interaction within the community. In many cases of informal buildings, the houses would start as a small private room on the shore, then gradually extended toward the channel as a walkway, then as kitchen or toilet, since the channel was expected to take the household sewage away. This unconventional way of spatial arrangement largely increased the community’s solidarity, as Jing-Yi portrayed in our interview: Granny Wang is the elder, and the representative of the community, so we often go chat in her place or play Chinese chess in No. 7 [referencing the number of a house]. These are our public spaces, where we engage with each other. Every day we chat, we share our lives together, and it has been like this for thirty years.
As described by Jing-Yi, extension spaces were flexibly used as walkways, storage, or rooms for gathering; they greatly increased the chances for people to meet and interact with each other, and consequently enhanced the closeness of the community. Together, the crooked alley, the rustic buildings, and the intimate social relations interweave into an unadorned way of living, in contrast with the condominiums lining nearby, filled with households that barely know each other. To counteract the county government’s plan of rationalising the neighbourhood, the Liu-Gong channel squatters engineered the cultural features of their houses to re-engage them with the urban redevelopment project, turning the community into a cultural/tourist attraction. With the help from many associated NGOs, the local residents actively marketed the settlements as an historic/cultural site in the city by holding a photo gala in the community
Chien as a showcase of their everyday lives. They hoped the old pictures taken from this community’s past could remind people of how this community had struggled through the city’s development, showing this community as a survivor from the poor days, not just the heavily polluted informal settlement it appears to be right now. During the gala, the squatters intentionally left their clothes on hangers in front of their homes as a part of the exhibition, like they normally do in the mornings, to provide people a sense of the informal settlement’s daily lives, and to make the community more relatable. By distinguishing the cultural value of the community, the commercial potentials of the informal settlements could thus be recognised. The idea of distinguishing the local informality as a form of urban lifestyle is the result of consulting with the planning experts from NTU. As these planning experts are mainly scholars and graduate students with a background of architecture and urban planning, they were quite familiar with the entrepreneurial discourse that engages waterfront renovation with local redevelopment. Hence, instead of stressing the local squatters’ rights to the city, putting them at the opposite side of the urban hegemonic project, they decided to adapt to the urban entrepreneurial project. By making the counter-proposal of redefining urban informality as Taiwan’s urban cultural character, it reconciled the informality with the urban entrepreneurialism, turning the informality into a strength of Taipei County’s competiveness in terms of living and tourism. Such combining of urban informality with entrepreneurialism also offers economic incentives for the neighbourhood nearby, gaining support for the counter-proposal. As Fu-Te told me, the cultural landscape project changed his opinion about the sustaining of the informal settlement: Of course the people at this side do not want them to become a ‘historic site’, we want them
11 gone. [.] If the government could remodel the street, like they did for the Shen-Keng Old Street, then it would be a different case. [.] Like in the case of the Shen-Keng Old Street, the small businesses [along the street] really picked up since the place was rehabilitated. However, if they stay unrefined, then I would prefer them to be torn down. [.] As the head of the neighbourhood, I think the houses could stay if the government can turn the place into a tourist attraction. If they don’t, then the place should be demolished.
In this sense, the River County project could be understood as a discursive practice that shapes the subjectivity of people like Fu-Te. To Fu-Te, the meaning of sustaining the informal settlement depends entirely on the tourist potential they could possibly provide for the county. To the neighbourhoods nearby, the informal settlement in the current state was a source of negative environmental and aesthetical impacts. Hence the informal settlement had to be transformed, converted into a more pleasant environment in order to fit the liveable urban space that local government had committed to creating. In this sense, the strategy of incorporating urban informality into urban entrepreneurialism is an act of pragmatism, through which the squatters negotiate their stay by market rule, rather than their right to the houses per se.
Making Xi-Jou tribe an Aboriginal Cultural Park Another case of entrepreneurialising informality is the establishing of the Xi-Jou tribe as the Aboriginal Cultural Park. The Xi-Jou tribe was an urban tribe that was mainly made up of indigenous people from eastern Taiwan, who migrated to the city to seek jobs during the urbanisation of the 1980s. In order to deal with economic hardship, and at the same time maintain their traditional lifestyle, they ended up settled in the watershed
12 of Xin-Dian stream, a tributary of the TamSui river. When the county government decided to redevelop the county by restoring the waterfronts, the Xi-Jou tribe became the target of another waterfront renovation project called ‘The Big Bi-Tan project’. The Big Bi-Tan project is also a part of the River County project. It aimed to remove all the constructions in the waterfront and relocate the people to a public housing estate, as the waterfront squatters were deemed to be endangered by the floods. However, this relocation plan jeopardised the squatters’ way of life on two levels. First, compared with their current state, living in public housing would raise their household expenses since they would be obliged to pay rent. This financial burden would have the greatest impact on those who were currently unemployed, and were in difficulties. The second impact on the tribe was cultural. To the people in the tribe, living in the place they had co-developed was a crucial part of maintaining their tribal way of life. The relocation project planned to re-accommodate the squatters in huge condominiums 20 km away, which would sabotage their existing function as a tribe. Therefore, people in the tribe organised a local movement, protesting against the relocation plan. In this movement, the tribe was argued to be culturally significant in terms of its well-balanced style between tribal and urban life. People in the tribe could work as construction workers, delivery people, or any other jobs during the day, while living as elders and villagers when they were home. Once the tribe was relocated, this unique lifestyle would also gradually be extinguished. With the assistance of the volunteering planning experts from NTU, the Xi-Jou tribe eventually proposed the Xi-Jou Aboriginal Cultural Park to negotiate their way into the urban entrepreneurial project of waterfront regeneration. In this renewed plan, the informal settlement was re-assigned by the local government as
Urban Studies 00(0) an indigenous cultural zone, in which the indigenous people could live and develop tourism. This plan emphasised the cultural, and potential tourist value that this could contribute to the urban redevelopment. By keeping the tribe in this aboriginal cultural park, not only is the living style of an urban tribe thus maintained, but also the traditional indigenous rituals and ceremonies may provide an authentic experience for visitors interested in indigenous culture. In other words, there is a potential economic prospect that the tribe could contribute to the local redevelopment and so earn its keep. As an interviewee, Mayaw, stated: The government initially wanted us to move, but after we made a counter proposal, they started considering the possibility of letting us keep our tribe. In the end, they agreed to let us to rebuild the tribe in another place.
Mayaw is a middle-aged man who moved to the tribe along with his father when he was a child. Spending most of his life here, he is deeply involved in the life of the tribe, and had been advocating saving the tribe. To him, turning the tribe into an aboriginal cultural park was a pragmatic way to maintain the life of the tribe. Nonetheless, in the end the tribe was partially relocated because of security reasons. Since part of the tribe was demarcated as in danger of flooding, the households in the lower ground had to be relocated to an adjacent yet higher ground, so that the tribe could keep its current function while not being exposed to the threat of floods. Even so, this partial relocation was not accepted without dispute in the tribe. Since the aboriginal cultural park proposal included the relocation of the tribe, some residents, especially the first generation of urban migrants, were worried about the impact that relocation would have on the tribe, and remained reluctant about the aboriginal cultural park proposal. However,
Chien to the younger generation such as Mayaw, turning the tribe into an aboriginal cultural park and the formalising of the informal settlement meant the prospect of a more secure, long-lasting tribe living in the city, and hence they eventually persuaded the older generation. As Mayaw stated: It’s not just about us. We have to think about our children. Though it will be a huge change for us, yet the tribe will live on, and the way of our life will be passed on.
To the people in the tribe, their primary concern about the aboriginal cultural park proposal is whether the tribe could maintain its function after the relocation. Relocating to a designated aboriginal cultural park not only granted the tribe appropriate land use categories, letting them off the hook of the original relocation plan, but it also reconnected the tribe with an urban tenant system, formalising the informal settlement. In this sense, turning the Liu-Gong channel informal settlement into a historic site and the Xi-Jou tribe into an aboriginal cultural park are both the entrepreneurialisation of urban informality. Urban informality was therefore no longer treated as the stumbling block of local development, but instead remade as a token of Taipei’s urbanisation path, an element of the metropolitan attraction for further economic development.
Local impacts under entrepreneurialising informality Through its entwining with entrepreneurial thinking, and the mediation of community planning, urban informality was thus redefined from a housing strategy to a new urban economic strategy. The unsystematic building of houses, which was once regarded as a compromise of a modern urban plan,
13 has now been reimagined as having cultural significance to the city. The crooked lanes, the grungy walls, and the tatty roofs that mark the informal buildings, are now recognised as momentous features of Taipei. This unconventional engagement between urban entrepreneurialism and informality reshaped the local political reality in the county. To the local squatters, this engagement deconstructed the assumed antithesis between informality and economic development. Though it spared them from the public shaming of being unsanitary and economically unviable, at the same time it reenforced a new form of entrepreneurialism among squatter communities. In the case of the Liu-Gong channel renovation, since the informal settlement became a part of the urban redevelopment project, they had to meet the modern sanitary standards in order to make the redevelopment possible. Under the circumstances, though most parts of the informal settlement continued to exist, some small detached rooms in close proximity to the channel were torn down in order to obtain the necessary space for constructing a new sewerage system. This meant that some of the households lost their storerooms, kitchens or bathrooms in the renovation project, and had to figure out a way to readjust these lost facilities into the space they had kept hold of. In short, this informal settlement may be able to keep living the same place, but the spatial arrangement of their homes and the customs they developed accordingly all had to be re-habituated. The impact of entrepreneurialism on Xi-Jou tribe is more evident. Now that the tribe had become a part of the indigenous cultural zone, it could no longer be an enclosed community. Furthermore, since it is expected to provide some tourist attraction to the local redevelopment, it had to be more open and welcoming to the public. Unsurprisingly, this transformation has
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raised some concerns that the entrepreneurialising of Xi-Jou tribe would erode its existing way of life. As Mayaw stated: To protect this community’s way of living, they have to stop bothering us with so many things. They have to stop making all these rules for the tribe, this is not a zoo! [.] If they want to make the tribe a tourist spot, fine by me, but we have to figure out the way to separate our private lives to this.
Though the entepreneurialising of the informal settlement did spare the tribe from displacement, the people in the tribe are still worried about losing privacy in their new life in the Aboriginal Cultural Park. Besides these concerns about privacy, living in the Aboriginal Cultural Park could also affect the tribe in terms of household finances. In its previous form, the tribe lived in an informal settlement, and the people did not have to pay rent. Now that the tribe has been made a part of park, the people have thus become the tenants of public land, and are therefore obliged to pay rent for the land they use. This could create a new financial burden for people in the tribe, especially those who are currently unemployed, jeopardising the sustaininability of the tribe. Therefore, the people also had to develop new ways to cope with this potential threat to the tribe. As Mayaw further elaborated: We will found our own association, establishing a legal person to run the tribe, pay the rent. [.] Some people will be not able to pay the rent. So we are thinking about learning to run some small businesses, something the tribe could manage together, so that the tribe could have a mutual fund. That way, if there are some people in the tribe have difficulties, we can still maintain our living.
By running the tribe communally, the tribe is thus able to absorb the impact of rent to the residents in financial difficulty, keeping the integrity of the tribe. Under the
circumstances then, entrepreneurialising of urban informal settlements is not just a strategic policy that makes the sustaining of informal settlements possible, but it has actually become a process that mobilises the entrepreneurship of the squatters, making them a new forming force in the shaping of the urban redevelopment. During this process, although squatters have minimised their chances of being displaced, they have still had to sacrifice some old ways of living, adjusting to the new aspects of their lives that the entrepreneurialisation has brought. In terms of local government, the entrepreneurialising of informal settlements not only made sure that the urban redevelopment could be carried out smoothly, but it also conveniently spared local government from directly confronting the squatters, and the political consequences for the displacement. By making the informal settlements a part of the redevelopment plan, the local government was able to shift away its responsibility for accommodating people, since the entepreneurialisation of informal settlements lays particular stress on the agency of local squatters. Consequently, the squatters have to demonstrate their cultural uniqueness and economic value in order to ‘earn’ their privilege to stay, instead of just having their right to the city. That being the case, the local government avoided their responsibility to accommodate these people, making housing a personal responsibility, not a public one. Since this new form of informality is negotiated through urban entrepreneurialism, it should be thus understood as ‘entrepreneurialising informality’, which has redefined the spatial value of informal settlements in terms of their entrepreneurial value to the urban redevelopment. This entrepreneurialising informality, although it may not be the preferable entrepreneurial plan for the local government, it has become a new way to enable urban entrepreneurialism. It
Chien helps entrepreneurialism to negotiate its way into a city that is dominated by informality, re-engaging informality with globalised urban development.
Conclusion The entrepreneurial city is often treated as being at odds with urban informality. Since it often accompanies the introduction of private capital and the redevelopment of urban space, it is usually perceived as a force of exclusion by local people (Jou et al., 2016). However, by examining the new discourses and strategies produced by local squatters, we can see how local people exhibit their agency, changing the course of entrepreneurialisation (McFarlane, 2012a). This paper has shown that entrepreneurial urban policy mutates and transforms though its encounter with urban informality. The cases of XiJou tribe and Liu-Gong informal settlement demonstrated the unlikely co-evolution between urban informality and urban entrepreneurialism. With the mediation of community-planning system, the residents actively participated in the transformation of waterfronts, incorporating themselves into these entrepreneurial projects, turning themselves into the cultural attractions of the city. Entrepreneurialising informality could therefore be a powerful tool in delineating subaltern urbanism. It stresses the ways in which urban entrepreneurialism is mediated, interpreted, and actualised in different political-economic contexts. By mobilising the features of urban informality as part of the city’s cultural appeal, the squatters actively took part in the shaping of the urban regeneration project, turning informal settlements into a cultural asset to the city. In this sense, the squatters negotiated themselves out from the immediate threat of displacement. This narrative of subaltern stresses the agency of local squatters, moving attention from the policy end of
15 entrepreneurialism to the local end, illuminating the way in which entrepreneurialism is exercised and lived. While entrepreneurialising informality enables new hopes for the squatters, it also creates new forms of exclusion and inequality. This co-production of space between entrepreneurialism and informality creates new tensions, raises new questions through this intermeshing process. In the case of XiJou tribe and Liu-Gong channel renovation, though the informal settlements were not completely excluded by the local redevelopment plan, they have had to endure changes in spatial orders and financial arrangements just to keep their living in the neighbourhood. Furthermore, although this entrepreneurialising informality presented some new possibilities to the local actors, enabling some squatters to participate in shaping the urban redevelopment plan, at the same time it remains a threat to the less resourceful informal settlements. Since this entrepreneurialising informality has shifted almost all responsibility for the housing plan to the local squatters, it may cause displacement to the squatters that were unable to make an entrepreneurial plan for their own informal settlements. Therefore, instead of seeing entrepreneurialising informality as a solution for the exclusion of informal settlements in the urban development, it should be employed as a way to scrutinise the transforming local interactions between globalised urban entrepreneurialism and local agency. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.
Note 1. Jing-Yi and another interviewee, Mayaw, were both the main participants in the local redevelopment projects. Since they both have
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Urban Studies 00(0) profound knowledge of the Liu-Gong channel and Xi-Jou tribe’s redevelopment, this paper takes many quotes from their words.
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