Fluidity of local identity and the permeable boundaries of places in
Taiwan’s spatial conservation projects
KANG, Min Jay
Associate professor, Graduate Institute of Building and Planning
National Taiwan University
Through the endeavors of conservation activists of different generations,
Taiwan’s historical conservation has evolved from the preservation of objects
into ‘historical projects’ of sustaining place identity and socio-spatial structure.
Oftentimes, the growing concerns of community empowerment also play a vital
role in the processes of dynamic conservation to strengthen the authentic social
networks. However, the historical discourses that facilitate the conservation
projects rely heavily on the linear accounts of the grand narratives, and the
meanings of places can be subjugated to static and fixed interpretations.
As more and more exogenous concerned groups and artists are involved in
conservation activism, interpretations of particular places have also become
diverse and sometimes obtrusive. On certain circumstances, re-interpretations of
place meanings could foster a new sense of community to further induce a more
inclusive and progressive society, especially in times of drastic transformation
and crisis. Local identity is therefore a rather elusive concept which often
confronts contested interpretations, and the legitimacy of conservation may be
justified from different perspectives accordingly.
Two cases of spatial conservation will be discussed to explore the fluidity of local
identity and to polemicize the permeable boundaries of places: one in the remote
indigenous homeland of Davalan in south Taiwan’s Ping-Dong county after the
catastrophe of Typhoon Morakot in 2009, the other one in Taipei’s Toad Hill
settlement located in the peripheral hillside of the basin city. The former is
undergoing a self-help restoration by a few families who refused the conditional
disaster-relief program of the government and diverged intentionally from the
exodus of their tribesmen who decided collectively to accept the exchange of
their properties in the traditional territory at the high mountains with the
“permanent housing” of Rinari built by the government and World Vision at the
lower farmland of Magazaya. While the new shared identity of Rinari is a
hybridity of three distinctive tribes, the original identity of Davalan homeland
has evolved a renewed spirit which is nurtured by an
indigenous-turned-intentional community. The conservation of Davalan is
grounded not only on traditional wisdom and local knowledge, but also on values
of sustainability and networking with the larger world – that is, a subtle balance
between root and route.
The conservation of Toad Hill settlement, on the other hand, is an entanglement
of land-use juxtaposition of military landscape, ecological environment,
agriculture and animal husbandry, university campus, cemetery, and national
property, with a squatter settlement of “arrival city” sitting amidst them and all
under the regulations of modern urban planning. Artist and activist groups
intervened the premeditated demolition of a former military-dependent living
quarter in core of the settlement after its residents were relocated, and following
the precedent conservation feat of the nearby Treasure Hill settlement, a cry for a
wholesale conservation of the entire settlement became another artivist (art +
activist) project that challenged the current mode of urban governance. The
ongoing conserv’action’ demonstrates a deliberate re-interpretation of the place
by bringing a variety of narratives of films, literature, photography, paintings,
exhibitions, and intentional recounting of the mutually-reciprocated relationship
between the former city of Air Task Force (ATF) 13’s Taipei Air Station and the
informal city of the Toad Hill settlement, as well as the direct outcome of
dissolving the boundary of the well-defined hillside village – the recent
recognition of Taipei’s Cultural Landscape title under the Cultural Heritage
Preservation Act.
These two cases represent how the genius loci of particular places may still be
contextualized in political and social conditions and while it may be the
indispensable driver of spatial conservation, it can also be reconfigured by the
act of conservation.