A Critical Analysis of Culture-led Urban Regeneration Policy in Taipei and Beyond

This thesis critically and empirically investigates Taipei city’s creative and culture-led urban regeneration policies (CCURP) in recent decades to better understand how creative culture-led urban regeneration policies are generated and fixed into the city’s local context. This research challenges and complements the existing research on CCURP, policy movements (policy mobilities), and gentrification and adds empirical richness to a body of work which is generally overly theoretical, focused on a small lexicon of places and in most cases lacking in in-depth and systematic empirical examination of the causalities (among policy interventions, social impacts, and influential factors) in diverse contexts and in places ‘off the map’. A qualitative approach is adopted with an intensive case study of one CCUR policy, the Urban Regeneration Station scheme focusing on Dihua Street but also covering other areas in the city. Based on empirical data derived from in-depth interviews, analysis of documents, and observation, this thesis reveals that local complex, dynamic and yet intertwined issues of political and economic change, active civil society and global knowledge flow explain the emergence of this and other CCURP in Taipei. In concrete, this work addresses the issues of CCURP from three observation points to shed light on their move from elsewhere in the world to Taipei, the factors shaping them in the local context and their social impact on a local community. Firstly, it focuses on policy mobilities closely examining paths, learning schemes and intermediaries. It argues that the city’s CCURP are highly associated with global knowledge flows and that local planning elites are key actors in knowledge filtering and policy making, thus resulting in an incomplete and uneven learning process. Secondly, through an analysis of from policy objectives, processes, categories and policy discourse, it argues that the URS scheme is a highly localised and contested CCUR policy hiding a less precise and more haphazard executive process. Finally, it argues that CCURP have dominated the city’s redevelopment direction combining with commercial and aesthetic forces to produce a mixed type of state-led commercial aesthetic gentrification.