Housing Transformations and Financialised Urbanism: The Case of Military Dependents’ Villages in Taipei

As a developing concept, financialisation discourses circulating outside Anglophone countries are still lacking empirical underpinnings. In terms of the inconsistent and diverse grounded patterns of financialisation in spaces (Aalbers, 2020), Christophers (2015: 187) proposes capturing everyday life to improve the ‘analytical and communicative clarity’ of financialisation. In response to these gaps, this research aims to deepen the geographical understanding of housing financialisation in Taiwan and shed new light on international debates by analysing the financialised housing landscape, specifically, the everyday life in Military Dependents' Villages (MDVs). Systematic MDVs emerged as a unique spatial formation in the 1940s, accommodating hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees. Since the end of the 1970s, they have been extensively reconstructed and privatised. Based on secondary documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and residents, and visualising spatial transformations conducted from 2021 to 2022, this research demonstrates the transformations of MDVs from housing infrastructure as welfare to a strategic resource serving policy objects and political interests through the interventions of a developmental state. Constrained by the existing fiscal framework familiar to the technical bureaucrats, privatisation employing financial measures was introduced to facilitate the MDV reconstruction. As a form of parallel institutionalism closely intertwined with military governance, the everyday lives within the MDVs were significantly influenced during the process of de-militarisation. The state simplified the lifestyle and informality existing in the MDVs, determining residents' relocations through fiscal frameworks and regulatory systems. The visualisation of spatial transformations resulting from the two phases of reconstruction illustrates the extent of relocation from the city centre to areas with lower land prices. The reconstruction mechanisms have also reinforced an ownership-oriented housing environment and indirectly shaped opportunities for speculative activities. This research situates MDV housing within international debates and conceptualises the relations between MDVs, space, urbanisation, and de-militarisation.