SUMMARY

Culture-led Urban Regeneration and Community Mobilisation: The Case of

the Taipei Bao-an Temple Area, Taiwan
By:
Karishma Prasad(UP/1130)
II semester, Masters in Urban Planning

In its introduction the paper examines two approaches used for intervention in post-industrial
urban regeneration by local governments. The first, being the policy makers attempt to merge
cultural policy with urban regeneration projects as strategic intervention to resolve the multi-
dimensions of socio-economic problems like declining urban areas, financial crises, etc. For this,
cultural infrastructure and arts festivals are regarded as catalysts for job creation and
revitalization of urban areas. Cultural flagship projects thus becoming part of city branding,
means to attract cross-border business and inner investments. Second is the re-evaluation of
unique resources of place, civil-society strength and place-identity as drivers for local
sustainability and urban social cohesion. This involves linking local cultural projects with civic
identities to enliven local communities, cultivate local distinctiveness and also successfully
engaging with peoples sense of belonging in a place and their everyday cultures in the long term
as well as to look at cultural festivals as crucial elements in revitalization projects.
The authors then review the current culture-led regeneration debates by rethinking the deficits of
existing strategies; while arguing for an alternative approach that conceptualizes the role of
community mobilisation as a way to integrate unique cultural resources into regeneration
projects. Originally culture-led strategies were used to deal with multi-level socio-economic
problems. The in 1970s and 80s, the cultural policy and urban regeneration were merged as one a
policy solution to ease the crises of industrial restructuring in order to create a post-industrial
urban landscape, to attract inward investment, to resolve the shortage of public finance and to
strengthen urban competitiveness. The two characteristics of contemporary place-making policy
shown by urban cultural strategies area; one is to bring the global into the local while other is to
bring the local into the global. In the earlier, aim is to attract the flow of global tourists, to
enhance their sites for mobile high-skilled labor and to maintain themselves as viable key nodes
within the global production network. While in the latter, the images of cultural cities are
delivered into the global or regional market place through selling local cultural products to global
tourists. However, culture-led urban regeneration has its certain drawbacks. One is chance of
exaggeration of economic contributions of culture in urban regeneration. Another drawback is a
type of spatial in-equality being caused by the regeneration. Also, commerce-oriented cultural
flagship strategies imply social exclusion and the lack of local particularities like generating a
kind of gentrification effect in the city centre.
In the subsequent section, two major changes in the strategic intervention of regeneration
projects and place-making strategies needed in order to seek the sustainability of culture-led
urban regeneration are described. These strategies are- including local communities in cultural
regeneration process decisions and integration of the local endogenous festival into the urban
regeneration plan. Both these help to revitalize the communitys identity and sense of
belongingness as well as foster local mobilizations.
Next, the paper describes the research methodology adopted while giving an introduction to
Taipeis Bao-an temple which is regarded as one of the symbolic heritage sites in the city. This
area is one of Taipeis oldest districts and can be traced back to the immigration from mainland
China during the Ching dynasty. The Bao-an Temple was established in 1830 and increasingly
became the main centre for local communities during the 19th century. Traditional cultural
features and social dynamics constitute the local particularities of this area. The core area of this
regeneration project comprised of two national cultural heritage sites, the Bao-an Temple and the
Confucius Temple, and an historical building; and the Dalong Elementary School.
The paper then discusses the policy context of this culture-led urban regeneration. The goal of
the project was to achieve a multifaceted revitalization of the historic area, including its local
economic development, the creation of a new image of community, an improvement to the
quality of life and to the vitality of the community. These initiatives were aimed to encourage
the mobilisation of cultural activities, to foster a common awareness by local inhabitants and to
improve the communitys environment. The central government attempted to use the cultural
activities and facilities to transform the quality of everyday life and to shape identity in local
inhabitants neighbourhoods.
The further portion of the paper describes the community mobilisation process in Bao-an
temples heritage renovation. In this process first, the central government empowered the local
temple to adopt a self organising method of heritage conservation as opposed to using the states
subsidies to conduct a bureaucratic process of heritage conservation. The Bao-an Temple, thus,
mobilised the traditional knowledge of local craftsmen and the modern conservation science of
international experts to preserve this heritage resource. Second, the endogenous cultural festival
was used as an integral way to foster the communitys vitality in this regeneration project. The
Bao-an Temples festival, one of the biggest religious events in northern Taiwan, is a long-
established historical tradition which has been celebrating the common folk religion for more
than 200 years.
The,next section discusses the collaborative partnership between the local government and local
communities where the local government shifted from being a regulator to collaborator. It
enrolled public resources, local media and tourist industries to promote the endogenous image of
the Bao-an Temple and its festival. In this, the volunteer system of Bao-an temple also
constituted a bottom-up support which fostered the rise of collective social capital.
The regeneration of the Bao-an Temple area was achieved incrementally through a series of
small spatial projects which benefited from the three community-based planning institutions in
Taipei. One prominent example lies in the visible partnership of community organizations and
government, implemented by three community-based spatial improvement projects in the Bao-an
Temple area, including the Environment Improvement Programme of the Bao-an Temple, the
Forty-four Villages Museum Conservation Plan and the Nightlight Design Engineering Project.

The authors then talk about forging a virtuous cycle of culture-led urban regeneration which
emerges in three aspects. First, when the local government highlights the use of existing cultural
resources and the endogenous festival in the regeneration project, it results in an increasing
emergence of local particularities. Then, revitalizing the place identity to which local inhabitants
are attached, more inhabitants will be automatically involved in this cultural project. Second,
since local communities have the knowledge and relational resources to conserve heritage
resources and to mobilise the cultural festival, it leads to integration of local cultural resources
into the regeneration project. And, this comes through a local mobilisation network rather than
through a state-led project. Thirdly, this collaborative partnership within the Taipei Bao-an
Temple area emerged when institutional capacity continuously to support traditional cultural
activities and to maintain heritage spaces was enhanced.