Riverfront as a re-territorialising arena of urban governance: Territorialisation and folding of the Xindian River in Taipei metropolis

Abstract

Chinese

This paper foregrounds the riverfront as a re-territorialising arena of urban governance. Through a long-term study of the Xindian River in Taipei metropolis, Taiwan, we illustrate how the riverfront can be the key locus where the expansion of the urban frontier is manifested through and intertwines with the transformation of nature. While first interwoven with everyday activities of subsistence, Xindian River was gradually turned into the periphery of the city and then green space for recreation, a process actualised through infrastructure aimed at flood control and waste treatment as well as other informal activities that challenge such measures. We propose that ‘territorialisation’ and ‘folding’ are notions that can grasp asymmetrical relations embedded in the physical landscape. We argue that a riverfront landscape composed by territorialisation and heterogeneous folding reveals that the emergence of a negotiable state–society relationship is pivotal in the production of the urban riverfront of Taipei.

Keywords

environmental ecology greenification political ecology spatial production state–society relationship

Introduction

Waterfront redevelopment has been identified as a vital strategy for the regeneration of post-industrial cities since the turn of the late 1970s. While criticism is often concerned with the gap between the regeneration rhetoric and the effects it truly generates on the land in question (Harvey, 1993; Oakley and Johnson, 2013; Sandercock and Dovey, 2002), the riverfront per se is less the centre of attention. In other words, the role of nature such as rivers, ocean or beach fades away in most of the discussions regarding waterfront developments in urban studies. How people’s relationships with these fluid yet evident boundaries are adjusted and hence the way their nature-mediated daily life is reshaped receives little attention despite the many explorations dedicated to riverfront areas. On the other hand, researchers taking a political ecology approach propose the notion of ‘social nature’ and are concerned with the coevolution of society and nature (Castree and Braun, 2001). Among the critical research following this line, studies of environmental history have been depicting the long-term social production of urban riverfronts (see Allen, 2008; Armstrong et al., 2009; Gandy, 2006; Kelman, 2003; Summitt, 2013; Tvedt, 2004). We follow their steps but hope to shed light on how the vicissitude of the riverfront landscape contributes to our understanding of urban governance in relation to the spatial re-territorialisation of urban nature.

Through a case study of the Xindian River in Taipei metropolis, Taiwan, we try to show how the city is constantly re-territorialised during different stages of treatment of the riverfront, during which the recent regeneration phenomenon is not the full picture but a key moment. While Xindian River is only one tributary of the Danshui River – the major river in Taipei metropolis – it was nevertheless the first river section that was dramatically transformed through modern hydraulic technology during the 20th century. It is also the foremost riverside area where diverse informal activities at the city margin settled and have been developing since the early post-war period.

Our discussion is based on fieldwork undertaken between September 2012 and May 2017 under three successive research projects that, respectively, concern the water supply system, the urbanisation of the riverfront and the animal–human relationship along the riverfront in Taipei metropolis. We conducted in-depth interviews with the authorities in charge of the riverfront management, such as the Taipei Water Department, and non-governmental organisations that have been dedicated to riverfront issues such as habitat conservation, wild bird protection and stray dog management. User experiences are also gathered through long-term fieldwork. Sixteen farmers of riverfront vegetable gardens with an average age above 70 and three dog-feeders approximately in their 60s were our frequent subjects of observation and interaction. We also approached 50 riverfront users (including nearby residents and people jogging, biking and dog walking), asking them to fill out a questionnaire that investigated their likes and dislikes about the riverfront space. If they agreed, we carried out a short interview to understand their experiences more deeply. Eighteen such interviews, which lasted on average about 20 minutes, were conducted. Secondary data such as journalism, official documents and studies about the informal settlements at the Xindian riverfront were compiled to depict the long-term vicissitude of the Xindian riverfront, and to foreground certain controversial events that can be juxtaposed with our own fieldwork.

The following sections first revisit the riverfront issues to anchor our research at the intersection of critical urban studies and environmental history with a political ecology perspective, and propose that notions of ‘territorialisation’ and ‘folding’ may help us grasp and concretise the power relations embedded in the advancement of the urban frontier. A review of the Xindian River since the 18th century is then given, followed by the illustration of territorialisation and folding occurring at the Xindian riverfront after the 1980s. We argue that the not-necessarily-successful territorialisation of the riverfront and the persistence of the folding have showcased the emergence of a negotiable state–society relationship that demonstrates itself in urban governance.

The redevelopment of the riverfront as re-territorialisation of the urban frontier

Political economy, environmental history and political ecology: Riverfront issues revisited

Research on the redevelopment of the urban riverfront usually adopts a political-economic perspective while discussing the newly regenerated old industrial areas near the water. Faced with post-industrialisation, these projects are aimed at tourism as well as white-collar lifestyles. After regeneration, they are often lined with high-rise residential towers, commercial buildings, shopping malls, green spaces or riverside parks (Brown, 2009; Chang and Huang, 2011; Chang et al., 2004; Desfor et al., 2011; Dovey, 2005; Hoyle, 2002; Marshall, 2001; Saito, 2003; Sandercock and Dovey, 2002). Yet, as it turns out, many of these attempts cause an uneven distribution of resources, displacement of existing communities, destruction of the natural environment and social polarisation (Dooling, 2009). Concerned with the foreseeable impacts of gentrification, neo-liberalisation and entrepreneurialism, local communities sometimes seek alternatives under the banner of sustainability (Harvey, 1993; Rubin, 2011; Schaller and Novy, 2011). The riverfront therefore forms a significant political arena in the field of urban governance (Bassett et al., 2002; Gordon, 1997).

Concerned with the uneven geography of capital, the studies mentioned above capture only a rather short moment in the long history between human settlement and the water. However, historians have been researching the missing pieces. Since the 1960s, rising environmental concerns have led to a new cohort of historians whose writing is termed environmental history. Some highlight water as the indispensable instrument for human purpose, while others illustrate that the river, in turn, shapes people’s daily lives (see Summitt, 2013; Tvedt, 2004; Worster, 1992). The emergence of a city or region cannot be separated from its water (Armstrong et al., 2009; Kelman, 2003) and water keeps mediating urbanity even when a city has formed (see Smith, 2013).

Such focus on the entangled relations between society and nature is shared by scholars of political ecology but they have worked to further conceptualise it through the notion of socio-natures (Castree and Braun, 2001; Hinchliffe, 2007), arguing that in the urban area socio-natures, or urban nature, is the product as well as the medium of social–environmental changes (Swyngedouw, 2004). Given its Marxist legacy, compared with environmental history, political ecology is more capable of analysing issues of inequity, such as how neo-liberalisation increasingly dominates the production of nature (Bakker, 2005, 2010; Castree, 2008b), often under highly legitimate labels such as efficiency, user-paying principle, sustainability and civic participation (Castree, 2008a; Heynen and Robbins, 2005; Mansfield, 2004; Perreault, 2006; Prudham, 2004).

Our examination of the Xindian River will be anchored at the intersection of critical urban studies and the literature of environmental history re-oriented through political ecology. We look into the long-term production of the riverfront to unveil social relations dominating different historical periods. In exploring several stages of the physical reshaping of the riverfront, we foreground the riverfront as the city borderline that can be the key locus where one can analyse social nature in line with urban governance and where unequal social relations tend to manifest themselves through and intertwine with the transformation of nature.

Remaking the urban frontier: Territorialisation and folding of the riverfront

Landscape transformation often lies at the centre of social power, and the border that marks the end of such a landscape, though peripheral, can be where the transformation and its consequent tension takes the most radical form, since it marks the liminal space where humans confront nature, or civilisation meets the so-called ‘uncivilised’. A border is therefore also a frontier where human societies confront the relatively ‘raw’ wilderness. The maintenance, advancement or retreat of such a frontier are moments when human beings rearrange material objects to readjust the border defining the state, region or city so as to secure control of the resource (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018), to manifest political legitimacy (Howitt, 2001) or to open up new ground for economic development (Hung, 2014).

Re-arranging socio-materials is therefore pivotal to the revelation or consolidation of new territories and social relations. Such focus is recently accentuated in critical urbanism through the Deleuzian and Guattarian notion of assemblage, which is often explained together with territorialisation/re-territorialisation and de-territorialisation to emphasise how the city is shaped by the co-functioning of individual elements and ‘can be stabilised (territorialised or re-territorialised) or destabilised (de-territorialised) through this mutual imbrication’ (McFarlane, 2011: 208). ‘Re-territorialisation’ is therefore an idea conveying changes not only in a territorial boundary but also in relations between the elements involved. DeLanda (2016), in his deconstruction of spatial categories through close dialogues with assemblage, also notes that ‘territorialisation refers not only to the determination of the spatial boundaries of a whole […] but also […] to which an assemblage homogenises its own components’ (p. 22). Hence ‘[a] variety of territorialising and de-territorialising processes may change the state of a city’s boundaries, making them either more permeable or more rigid, affecting the sense of geographical identity of its inhabitants’ (p. 34).

While re-territorialisation implies that boundary making is accompanied by inherent homogenisation, it is still inadequate to address the hierarchical power relations permeating our real urban life. We intend to develop conceptions that can infuse re-territorialisation with this hierarchical tension. Bob Jessop’s (2016) exposition on ‘territorialisation’, which he contextualises through the formation of the state, and Deleuze’s (1993) less discussed idea of the ‘fold’, will therefore be drawn upon.

Bob Jessop defines territorialisation as ‘the enclosure of social relations into relatively bounded, demarcated political units or the attempted reorganisation of such units once they are established’ (Jessop, 2016: 125). He notes that such enclosure will rely on ‘infrastructural power’ or ‘the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and implement its actions across its territories’ (Mann, 2008: 355). Actually, infrastructural power in the modern sense often has to literally rely on the construction of large-scale infrastructure to infiltrate society and to stay in contact with the population (Schouten, 2013). Jessop’s notion of territorialisation, therefore, is associated with the kind of power addressing totality and modernity that is usually imposed through top-down planning and actualised through strategic material deployment.

Nevertheless, this territorialisation can rarely homogenise the entire landscape, since heterogeneous practices of everyday life always take physical forms. To capture this spatiality, which is incompatible with the ‘territorialised’ landscape, we turn to Deleuze’s Baroque philosophy of the fold. In The Fold, Deleuze draws upon Leibniz, who reads Baroque ornamentations as ‘a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings’ and whose continuum ‘must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper or of a tunic in folds’ (Deleuze, 1993: 6). This image of a continuum of curvature amenable to the environment indicates that the inflection of the fold ‘[expresses] the fact that something [has] happen[ed] on a curve’. A fold is therefore an action, or an event, that is the result of ‘actualised force’ (Laerke, 2010: 28).

This figuration of the fold is notable in that it foregrounds the kind of spatiality that is incessantly responsive rather than enclosed. While territorialisation, as defined by Jessop’s political-economic perspective, tends to encompass a relatively firm boundary, the fold shows that as such a boundary lands, creases might ripple concomitantly in reaction to the force. The fold can be seen as what territorialisation induces as it sweeps through, and yet, in our case, it is often self-willed actors who have allowed the fold to persist. Hence, we suffix fold as ‘fold-ing’, to stress that the creases often actively move across the territorialised landscape.

Territorialisation manifests the state’s actualisation of power in its deployment of socio-materials to form a boundary and homogenise its components, while folding refers to the spatiality – as ephemeral as it is – produced by heterogeneous actions that are at odds with the force of territorialisation. Folding only exists in relation to territorialisation and can be easily ironed smooth if territorialisation forcibly persists. Such hierarchical and asymmetrical power relations are what makes the identification of folding all the more important, since to analyse how it persists in relation to territorialisation can help one unveil the oppressive deployment behind it and also how escaping from such deployment works.

The tensioned co-existence of territorialisation and folding is perceived especially when re-territorialisation happens. The following section first outlines how a rigid riverfront boundary was gradually enclosed as the power of the modern state intervened – the periphery of a modern city which, however, posed challenges when later the riverfront was re-territorialised for urban redevelopment.

The early transformation of the Xindian riverfront

The 81-km-long Xindian River is one of three rivers flowing through the Taipei Basin and converging at the Danshui River. Part of the right bank of Xindian River borders Taipei City, while all the left bank adjoins the municipality of New Taipei City – once known as Taipei County before the administrative restructuring in 2010. Taipei County has long been the hinterland for Taipei City. Immigrants seeking jobs in Taipei City often live in the county where rents are lower and, even today, some factories still concentrate in the county areas. This obvious divide nevertheless has been at least sensuously dissolved as the riverfront emerges as the new frontier for urban redevelopment since the 1980s. Below we will begin with the much earlier days when neither Taipei City nor New Taipei City had come into being and when the Xindian River still directly nourished the adjacent settlements.

The riverfront as a shifting landscape of livelihood

Agricultural settlements with irrigation systems were first established along the Xindian River in the 18th century by immigrants from mainland China during the Qing Dynasty. Since, to launch such a system, relatively complicated technology and a large workforce had to be mobilised (Cai, 1999), the society featured many irrigation communities that bound respective members together under the mutual interest of water attainment. Such proximity to rivers, however, also put the settlements in regular threat of flooding. The absence of a unitary authority nevertheless indicates that substantial financial and material resources were unattainable and hence no notable measures of flood control were taken. Boundaries between people and rivers at this time were therefore shifting and vague. Different irrigation communities relied on their fertile yet treacherous riverfront to sustain livelihoods.

The Qing Empire’s defeat in the Second Opium War in 1860, however, engulfed Taiwan in the turbulence of imperial expansion. Threatened by foreign forces, the Qing Empire had to take the local governance of Taiwan more seriously. Taipei City Wall was therefore constructed but was built inland away from the original riverside settlements. The walls were mainly intended to protect the institutions of local government from the violence of the mob and bandits, and as a by-product they could also prevent floods (Investigation Report, 1896).

In 1887, Taiwan was officially made a province of the Qing Empire. However, a closer look at the measures taken by the government regarding water during the first two-thirds of the 19th century suggests that the state seemed invisible and local societies were regularly overcome by natural forces. The so-called city, or the local state of the Qing Empire, only convincingly manifested itself within the boundary of the wall. In the meantime, rivers in the Taipei Basin became a channel connecting different local settlements and linking them with the international trading network. The riverfront thus became independent from the city wall area; the former, while thriving, was dominated by local tradespeople and foreign businesses, rather than state-owned infrastructural power. This was a time when evident territorialisation had not reached the riverfront.

Riverfront as a controlled periphery under technological modernity

In 1895, the Qing Dynasty lost the First Sino-Japanese War, marking the beginning of the Japanese colonial period in Taiwan. The new regime undertook embankment construction, hydraulic surveys, soil and water conservation, flood control as well as a running water supply, and established specialised institutions in charge of water issues. Rivers in the Taipei Basin became the subject of modern technological control. Among them, Xindian River was conferred with the mission of providing raw water. With this new role, irrigation and drainage facilities as well as water pipelines and hydroelectric plants were installed along the river (Taiwan Historica, 2000). With the mediation of modern technology, getting water no longer required personal intervention. The 50 years of Japanese regime hence witnessed the first distinctive boundary between people and the rivers in the Taipei Basin.

The year 1945 marked the end of the Japanese colonial government. The new KMT (Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party) regime retreated to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party and endeavoured to ensure that the city which would become their temporary shelter was secured in every respect. The KMT then set out to strengthen the embankment to prevent flooding that might cause serious turmoil in a densely populated city where the soldiers and refugees they brought had just settled. Embankments along the Xindian River were among the first to be reinforced, since Xindian was where many of the soldiers and their families from the mainland were.

Up until the 1980s, the KMT technocracy aimed only to consolidate the immediate stability of the regime and, in particular, the durability of Taipei City. Infrastructure related to such concerns was the focus of the state and tended to concentrate at places with political, security and military significance. Deployment under such a mindset produced a prioritised territory of Taipei. Embankment reinforcement at the left bank of Xindian River, for example, was not launched until the 1980s.

As the rivers were increasingly transformed into an available resource for the urban area, the human–nature relationship was also further hidden. Especially on the right bank, irrigation canals built during the Qing Dynasty were covered up for the development of road traffic and, for the convenience of management, residents and users who had built homesteads near the rivers were evicted. The riverfront became a secluded area used by governments on both sides as landfill. However, a peripheralised riverbank was also suitable for informal activities. The underclass could make a living there through ways that were not allowed in the then rapidly urbanising Taipei, such as cultivating vegetable gardens.

Riverfront as the contested urban frontier

The beginning of the 1980s was marked by a tide of democratisation, as in 1979 the USA recognised Beijing’s status in the Chinese regime, threatening the ruling legitimacy of the KMT. This pressured the KMT to deregulate socioeconomic control. Social movements proliferated thereafter and a breeding ground for real estate redevelopment emerged. Derelict areas of the city were regenerated. The progressive middle class yearning for quality of life often imbued these areas with discourses of environmental and cultural values, while speculators looked to profit from the land (Wang and Lee, 2015). The riverfront was decidedly the frontier for both: during the 1980s and 1990s, riverbank areas were gradually ‘cleaned up’ and turned into green spaces for nearby neighbourhoods or habitat conservation and, after 2000, the Taipei City government attempted to partner with private capital to redevelop the riverfront, with the New Taipei City government following about a decade later (Wang et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, none of these measures went as smoothly as expected. As the government advanced the city boundary to the other side of the embankment with urban expansion and the middle class’s interests in environmental protection, they were faced with the immediate and truly tangible challenge of, first, the tremendous amount of urban waste that had been abjectly cast outside the bank and, second, a pervasive informal landscape of subsistence. These were the two elements that had typified the riverfronts during the previous 30 years but now had to be rearranged to form the new city territory.

Territorialisation of urban wastes: Sewerage, landfill removal and parks

During the 1960s, rural immigrants poured into Taipei and, with industrialisation, factory clusters and livestock farming gravitated to the city periphery where waste could be easily discharged, such as at the riverfront. This exacerbated the central government’s worries about water source pollution. Factories near the Xindian River became the targets of supervision following such concerns. Nevertheless, until the 1980s, systematic treatment of wastewater was absent.

In 1972, the ‘Committee of Piped Water Construction for Taipei District’, which was established in 1968, was renamed the ‘Committee of Piped Water and Sanitary Sewer Construction’ and was placed under the supervision of the Taipei City government. This new governmental body marked the nominal beginning of sewerage planning in Taipei City and sewerage would, in theory, fundamentally control the degree of river pollution. Water quality monitoring stations were also established at key locations, especially the upstream area, including Xindian.

Despite such efforts, sewerage construction progressed only slowly. Following the United Nations’ removal of the Republic of China as a legitimate member in 1971, loans from the World Bank and World Health Organization were terminated, resulting in a financial shortage for the sewerage project (He and Wang, 2017). It was decades before the rate of connection of households in Taipei City to sewerage rose, from zero to 20% in the early 1990s, to about 40% in 2000, 65% in 2010 and finally to 79% in July 2019 (Sewerage System Office, 2019). At the other side of the river, where population pressure was even higher in Taipei County, the start of sewerage construction had to wait until after 1990: the connection rate of sewerage to households amounted to only 29% in 2009 and 61% in 2019 (Construction and Planning Agency, 2019).

With the slow progression of the sewage treatment system, the riverfront remained largely smelly before 2000 and therefore unattractive for people to access. Nevertheless, facing the pressure of election,¹ the governments of Taipei City and Taipei County had already proposed agendas for riverfront greenification in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, respectively, when the realisation of such a vision was still unattainable. Particularly for the Taipei County government, the amount of landfill and factories along the riverfront hardly allowed any pleasurable landscaping. Throughout the 1990s and until the early 2000s, therefore, Taipei County had actually been ‘removing the waste’. County mayor’s reports show that ‘clearance/removal of humus soil’ recurred frequently in the government’s defence of their efforts on riverfront governance, while what this phrase really meant was that the government was still working arduously to remove the riverfront garbage and polluted soil.

Taipei City was able to progress faster. Following lobbying by environmentalists and non-governmental organisations such as the Wild Bird Society, the government had delineated two riverfront wetlands by the mid-1980s. One is located at the intersection of the Xindian River and the Danshui River and was originally named the ‘Zhongxing & Huajiang Bridge Migratory Bird Reserve’. The reserve aimed to protect animal habitat from contamination under urbanisation but, to better integrate it into the city mayors’ narratives of riverfront green space, it was renamed as ‘Huajiang Wild Goose Park’ later in the 1990s.

Not wishing to lag behind, the Taipei County government set up the High Riverbank Construction Management Office (HRCM) in 2001. HRCM was assigned with the mission to quickly produce riverfront green space while continuing with the difficult task of riverfront purification. Following suggestions by environmental NGOs, HRCM came up with an ‘ecological’ solution that could kill two birds with one stone: it designated several wetland areas along its riverfront, many of which are artificial and are actually used to gather and purify contaminated water. In its territorialisation of the urban periphery, the government has again created what many citizens regard as green landscaping.

Folding in the green: Vegetable gardens, informal settlements and stray dogs

In the mid-2000s, both banks of the Xindian River finally became clean enough for further greenification and cycle paths as well as other riverfront-related policies. One of Taipei City’s major riverfront projects between 2008 and 2010 was ‘Taipei Water Park’, which features the Xindian riverfront green space, the Japanese hydraulic facilities and the nearby cultural landscape of ‘Treasure Hill’ and shopping district. Meanwhile, the Taipei County government worked on the development of ‘Green Lake Recreation area’– a project that integrates Green Lake, a scenic riverfront attraction since the Japanese period, with the government’s landscaping efforts. ‘Sunshine Sports Park’– completed in 2009 and later boasting a sculpture-like ‘Sunshine Bridge’ connecting the pedestrians and cyclists of both banks – covers an extensive area of 20 ha.

At first sight, the infrastructural rearrangement of Xindian riverfront has reached such extent in 2010 that permeability and circulation in urban life thrives. A jogger, aged around 30 years in sharp sporty clothes, interviewed in October 2015 near Taipei Water Park (Taipei City), said he had come from Banqiao (New Taipei City). In describing how he perceived the riverfront, he said ‘I like the way the overall riverside parks are connected and vast. It takes little effort for me to come to this side. Strolling on the green and cycling across the river is refreshing exercise.’

The jurisdictional border has seemed to dissolve as the governments on both sides advance their hold on the riverfront, which allows this metropolitan lifestyle of ‘exercising in nature’ to quickly homogenise the previously wild riverside wilderness. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals that not all ‘nature’ matches such a conception.

Until 2015, a mosaic of vegetable gardens and tall weeds were still common on the left bank, despite the cycle paths. This relatively unstructured green space prompted many New Taipei City residents who hoped to ‘exercise in nature’ to turn to the right bank. Including the jogger mentioned above, one-third of the 35 users we approached on the right bank of the riverfront actually came from New Taipei City. So, paradoxically, while both city and county governments started promoting urban agriculture after 2010 to satisfy the urban middle class’s new hobby of growing vegetables on small downtown plots (Huang and Wang, 2016), riverfront farming, which had long been ubiquitous on both banks of the downstream Xindian River, was simultaneously shrinking in size as urban planning extended its reach.

‘[The government said] you are growing vegetables on riparian zone, not agricultural land,’ Qiu-nan, a 70-year old farmer who has been farming at the Xindian riverfront for more than 40 years, snapped. ‘I am furious. I have been growing vegetables here for decades and selling vegetables for decades […] This land belongs to my family. How come our farmland turns into “riparian zone” simply because of that planning rule coming from nowhere?’

It is under such pressure that these farmers adopt a guerrilla tactic where they track down private land still unexpropriated and lease the land from the owners, if the owners can be found. This allows them to become ‘legal’ tenants instead of encroachers. Many farmers have relocated from the right bank to the left during this process because the Taipei City government, which is more financially robust than the Taipei County government, had realised almost complete expropriation of the downstream Xindian riverfront by the mid-1990s. Taipei County’s inability to carry out land expropriation allows these creases of vegetable garden forced out by Taipei City to move in. Moreover, the government’s slow progression of green landscaping also provides shelter.

‘This time, I will hide,’ A-que, who is in her 80s and has been riverfront farming for more than 50 years, told us mysteriously one morning in May 2014. ‘I sent my son to weed before dawn this morning. There, the grass is tall. Here, it’s too easy to be spotted. Many farmers are hiding up, just like I do!’

Vegetable gardens are like fluid folds, drifting where the forces push them. However, embodying minority groups’ subsistence, riverfront informal settlements are taller, less movable and more materially tangible, and therefore become relatively solid folds that, if they aim to persist, have no escape but to directly engage with territorialisation. Treasure Hill and Xizhou tribe are two such examples. The former is a village on the right bank built since the 1960s by old veterans, and the latter is an aboriginal village on the left built by indigenous people, the Amis, as they migrated to Taipei in the 1980s. Both settlements faced threats of clearance during the mid-1990s and both initiated lengthy resistance which finally persuaded the authorities that the settlements showcased symbolic cultural value and so should be integrated into the planning system.

In 2011, Treasure Hill was officially designated as a cultural asset. Where it stands is zoned as a ‘special district for historical settlement’. With this new identity it is rightfully incorporated into the city government’s promotion of riverfront recreation (Chang, 2005). The same applies to the Xizhou tribe. The government allows the Amis to stay in the riparian area but asked them to move to a site 100 m higher, officially rezoned as ‘special district for aboriginal life’ (Wu and Chang, 2012). However, lack of public subsidy has endlessly delayed the tribe’s relocation. The urban aboriginal settlement now stands incompatibly next to a smooth grassy field. Across the river, a high-rise complex, MeHAS, which was developed under the Taipei City government’s partnership with private capital and which triggered corruption scandals, seems to ridicule the Xizhou tribe’s struggling persistence.

The partially territorialised folding of informal settlements is easily embraced into the leisure activities of the middle class. Many users on the right bank we interviewed have once stopped by Treasure Hill because they have heard ‘it’s a place with exotic architectural form where artists work’.² Nevertheless, these same users are less willing to acknowledge the existence of the even more exotic beings: stray dogs.

The significant presence of stray dogs manifests the ‘wildest’ part of nature that thus far escapes territorialisation. Taiwan has very loose regulations on dog keeping, which lead to careless abandonment. The riverfront was a popular place for abandoning dogs back when it was still the urban periphery. With the riverfront redevelopment, this wilderness of stray dogs, however, is increasingly deemed improper and even scary, as middle-class citizens frequent the riverfront parks for jogging, cycling or dog walking –‘To be politically correct … they talk about animal rights and say [stray dogs] can stay.’ A woman in her 50s chose the words carefully when we asked what she felt about riverfront stray dogs. ‘But you know, I want to have a stick with me when I walk by.’

Stray dogs cause such fear especially when they appear on the green fields along the cycle paths. They are not fully visible for most of the day, however. Only twice a day – in the morning and in the afternoon when dog-feeders arrive – will they completely leave their shelters, namely the tall weeds immediately adjacent to the water, waiting for food. ‘What we have been doing is to get the government and the people to understand that there are ways of co-existing, so you need not fear’ said Yang, an NGO member, ‘and you need not capture them all.’

Since 2010, many NGOs and volunteers have been working with the governments on both sides to realise this co-existence: they execute ‘TNVR’³ to reduce the number of stray dogs and ensure that dog-feeders will clean up after giving out food. Stray dogs who once resided on the city streets but were exiled to the riverbank now wretchedly linger at this frontier of urban expansion with the support of NGOs and feeders. Their tolerated existence forms what many riverfront users will regard as untamed wilderness that creases the smooth landscape.

As the city governments on both sides try to incorporate the riverfront into their governance agenda, regulation with regards to how nature should be experienced is also pushed to the urban periphery. Vegetable gardens, informal settlements and stray dogs thus become inappropriate nature – folding that obstructs the smooth and docile greenness. Simply put, their presence testifies how territorialisation does not fully get its way. Still, folding tends to be smoothed even when territorialisation is compromised: vegetable gardens have increasingly become more fragmented and out of sight; the residents of Treasure Hill are marginalised despite the preservation of their settlement; stray dogs are deprived of the extent of wilderness to which they have access. The greenness we now find on both sides of the Xindian River is therefore a patchwork of both territorialisation and heterogeneous folding, with the latter being the reminder or residue of the ‘wilderness’ (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Xindian River under green territorialisation.

Re-territorialisation of the riverfront as a manifestation of state–society relationships

Two moments of re-territorialisation, which entails the re-delineation of the city boundary through means of infrastructural power, significantly mark the transition of state–society relationships in Taiwan. First, at the turn of the 20th century the Japanese colonial government, and later, in the 1950s the KMT government, both aimed to show their presence and control over the island through the construction of infrastructure such as embankments and hydroelectric facilities. Then, around the 1980s, triggered by the socio-political transformation characterised by democratisation and economic de-regulation, there emerged a cohort of urban middle class who demanded a better quality of life and therefore larger green space in the city.

These two stages correspond to the shift from a strong and authoritative state to one that highlights the flexible negotiation of local states with emerging civil society. So, unlike Chien’s (2018) claim that the informal settlements at the Xindian riverbank, including those of the Xizhou tribe, have successfully appropriated the entrepreneurialist spirit of the concurrent urban development strategy to protest for their right of habitation, we argue that the Xizhou tribe, along with other informal activities of the underclass at the riverfront, actually testify to an emerging civil society with negotiable local states that accept the legitimacy of environmental and cultural appeal. In other words, while relevant, typical traits of Western entrepreneurialism, such as commodification, marketisation and profit-oriented plans, do not dominate the reshaping of the riverfront in Taipei – the developer of MeHAS, for example, was the only source of private capital that the Taipei City government managed to find during the bidding for another public–private partnership project at the city centre, which indicates that the bidding conditions did not offer sufficient profit for most private capital investors and that the so-called neo-liberalisation in Taiwan is actually much compromised under various technocratic rules (Chiang et al., 2010).

The need to gratify the new urban middle class actually dictates to a great extent the progress of both the Taipei and New Taipei City (Taipei County) governments in greenifying the riverfront and its actual effects. The construction of sewerage infrastructure, removal of landfill, as well as the clearance of other informal activities were mainly to answer the middle-class citizens’ demands for a better quality of life, especially when democratisation has allowed these people to elect the mayors they want. It is during this process that the authoritative state gradually loses its grip of the riverfront border. Given the central government’s lack of financial support to efficiently fulfil the sanitary construction demanded by citizens, this troublesome task was left to local governments, and would take more than 20 years before being ready to be presented to the public – during which time, local states are charged with the mission to make piecemeal advancement of waste treatment while still responding to other requests from the rising middle class.

The demands of the rising middle class can be varied. Most simply crave beautiful green space for recreation and leisure, while others advocate habitat conservation and cultural preservation. A few have protested for a right to housing and, increasingly, more people have grown aware of animal rights. The mainstream opinions have dominated the government’s construction of riverfront nature but other practices that go against such landscapes still leave their imprints. Farmers, dog-feeders, residents of the informal settlements, animal rights advocates and, notably, animals whose right of habitation are hierarchical (pet dogs and wild birds are obviously prioritised over stray dogs) are retained within the landscape and continue their shaping of the riverfront, which is an embodiment of the protests and negotiation they once had against or with the governments. The mosaic juxtaposition of the Xindian riverfront with the tailored green fields dotted with vegetable gardens, informal settlements and stray dogs therefore testifies to the negotiable relationship between the state and society after the 1980s (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The changing state–society relationships in the re-territorialisation of the riverfront.

Conclusion

Since the late 1990s issues of waterfront redevelopment have received scholars’ critical attention, mostly regarding this process as one phenomenon that epitomises the restructuring of capital or an arena for the entrepreneurial turn of urban policy. Yet, this is a perspective largely grounded in Western experiences and one that tends to overlook the many aspects that water has played in our everyday city life long before 2000. Our long-term investigation of the Xindian River in the Taipei metropolis, based around environmental ecology and political ecology, is an attempt to contribute to the re-thinking of the worldwide trend of waterfront redevelopment over the past two decades. Through the historical and empirical study of the Xindian riverfront in Taipei since the 18th century until now, we show that, whether for everyday subsistence, exploitation of natural resources, recreation or environmental conservation, people have always been redeveloping their river in one way or another, and with each transition of the uses of the riverfront, variations of urban nature are also produced, thus redefining the scope of city life.

As Taipei has been receiving the most eminent intervention of state power since the 20th century, the vicissitude of the riverfront’s nature along with its re-territorialisation also reveal how state–society relations in Taiwan have altered. During the Qing Dynasty, the riverside agricultural settlements reflected a human–nature relationship featuring locality-based everyday subsistence, while the riverfront as a controlled boundary after the 20th century corresponds to the formation of a city territory in the modern sense, which epitomises the authoritative states of Japan and KMT. The redevelopment of the Taipei riverfront after 1980, then, illustrates how, given the central government’s withdrawal of power and local governments’ growing intervention under democratisation, the originally sealed periphery becomes the new frontier where different ways of city life collide. Our case study shows that the slow progression of sewerage construction, riverfront clearance and green landscaping has allowed the persistence of marginalised subsistence, which sometimes underpins the intervention of social resistance and NGOs – such as management of stray dogs – and therefore manifests a negotiable state–society relationship.

Territorialisation and folding are the conceptions that we think can help foreground the spatio-material aspects inherent in this process. Territorialisation entails the execution of the planning system and infrastructural development such as waste removal and the construction of sewerage, embankments, bridges, cycle paths and greenification. Folding is socio-material arrangements that are rendered destabilised and incompatible by territorialisation, as exemplified by the informal subsistence and the existence of stray dogs. With these two notions, the asymmetrical power relations embedded in the everyday surroundings can be more easily identified.

The enclosure of the new urban territory is accompanied by the production of many unexpected creases upon the once peripheral border. By interpreting the riverfront redevelopment not only as a regeneration policy but also as a redefinition of the urban frontier, it is hoped that we reframe the worldwide trend of waterfront redevelopment as a moment of city building, where urban nature is re-territorialised by different social forces to their own ends. Such understanding of the riverfront as not only the co-produced result of humans and nature but also part of the crucial element of how city life is defined is anticipated to further the scope of natural governance in relation to cities.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan [grant number NSC 101-2410-H-002-076-MY2; MOST 103-2410-H-002-185; MOST 104-2410-H-002-173-MY2].

ORCID iD

Yu-Ting Kao

Notes

References

Allen

(2008) Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Armstrong

Evenden

Nelles

(2009) The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Bakker

(2005) Neoliberalizing nature? Market environmentalism in water supply in England and Wales. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 542–565.

Bakker

(2010) The limits of ‘neoliberal natures’: Debating green neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 34: 715–735.

Bassett

Griffiths

Smith

(2002) Testing governance: Partnerships, planning and conflict in waterfront regeneration. Urban Studies 39(10): 1757–1775.

Brown

(2009) America’s Waterfront Revival: Port Authorities and Urban Redevelopment. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Cai

(1999) A Bitan Romance: Seeking the Pioneering Traces of Liugong Canal. Taipei County: Xindian City Office (in Chinese).

Castree

(2008a) Neoliberalising nature: The logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and Planning A 40: 131–152.

Castree

(2008b) Neoliberalising nature: Processes, effects, and evaluations. Environment and Planning A 40: 153–173.

10.

Castree

Braun

(eds) (2001) Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

11.

Chang

(2005) The cultural strategies of urban governance and social movements: Anti-eviction movements of Treasure Hill, Taipei City. Chung Wai Literary Quarterly 33(9): 109–142 (in Chinese).

12.

Chang

Huang

(2011) Reclaiming the city: Waterfront development in Singapore. Urban Studies 48: 2085–2100.

13.

Chang

Huang

Savage

(2004) On the waterfront: Globalization and urbanization in Singapore. Urban Geography 25: 413–436.

14.

Chiang

Jou

(2010) Urban redevelopment and neoliberal governance: Empirical model for (re-)developing the Taipei Main Station Special District. City and Planning 37(2): 167–191 (in Chinese).

15.

Chien

(2018) Entrepreneurialising urban informality: Transforming governance of informal settlements in Taipei. Urban Studies 55(13): 2886–2902.

16.

Construction and Planning Agency (2019) Popularity rate of the national households connected with sewerage. Ministry of the Interior. Available at: https://www.cpami.gov.tw/ (accessed 20 September 2019).

17.

DeLanda

(2016) Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

18.

Deleuze

(1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Conley T. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

19.

Desfor

Laidley

Stevens

, et al. (eds) (2011) Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow. New York: Routledge.

20.

Dooling

(2009) Ecological gentrification: A research agenda exploring justice in the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33: 621–639.

21.

Dovey

(2005) Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne’s Urban Waterfront. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

22.

Gandy

(2006) Riparian anomie: Reflections on the Los Angeles River. Landscape Research 31(2): 135–145.

23.

Gordon

(1997) Managing the changing political environment in urban waterfront redevelopment. Urban Studies 34(1): 61–83.

24.

Harvey

(1993) A view from Federal Hill. In: Fee

Shopes

Zeidman

(eds) The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 227–252.

25.

Wang

(2017) Incomplete hygienic modernity or appropriate green infrastructure? The production and governance of constructed wetlands for sewage purification in New Taipei City. Journal of Urbanology 8(1): 83–132 (in Chinese).

26.

Heynen

Robbins

(2005) The neoliberalization of nature: Governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation. Capitalism Nature Socialism 16: 5–8.

27.

Hinchliffe

(2007) Geographies of Nature: Societies, Environments, Ecologies. London: Sage.

28.

Howitt

(2001) Frontiers, borders, edges: Liminal challenges to the hegemony of exclusion. Australian Geographical Studies 39(2): 233–245.

29.

Hoyle

(2002) Urban waterfront revitalization in developing countries: The example of Zanzibar’s Stone Town. The Geographical Journal 168(2): 141–162.

30.

Huang

Wang

(2016) Which nature is legitimate? The dissolving and reconstruction of vegetable gardens along the Xin-Dian riverfront. Taiwanese Journal of Sociology 59: 29–91 (in Chinese).

31.

Hung

(2014) Frontiers as dilemma: The incompatible desires for tea production in southwest China. Area 46(4): 369–376.

32.

Investigation Report (1896) Sewage Construction Report for Taipei City. Taiwan Governor-General’s Archives 101(46) (in Japanese).

33.

Jessop

(2016) The State: Past, Present, Future. Cambridge: Polity Press.

34.

Kelman

(2003) A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

35.

Laerke

(2010) Four things Deleuze learned from Leibniz. In: van Tuinen

McDonnell

(eds) Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–45.

36.

McFarlane

(2011) Assemblage and critical urbanism. City 15(2): 204–224.

37.

Mann

(2008) Infrastructural power revisited. Studies in Comparative International Development 43: 355–365.

38.

Mansfield

(2004) Neoliberalism in the oceans: ‘Rationalization’, property rights, and the commons question. Geoforum 35: 313–326.

39.

Marshall

(ed.) (2001) Waterfronts in Post-Industrial Cities. London: Spon Press.

40.

Oakley

Johnson

(2013) Place-taking and place-making in waterfront renewal, Australia. Urban Studies 50(2): 341–355.

41.

Prudham

(2004) Poisoning the well: Neoliberalism and the contamination of municipal water in Walkerton, Ontario. Geoforum 35: 343–359.

42.

Rasmussen

Lund

(2018) Reconfiguring frontier spaces: The territorialization of resource control. World Development 101: 388–399.

43.

Rubin

(2011) San Francisco’s waterfront in the age of neoliberal urbanism. In: Desfor

Laidley

Stevens

, et al. (eds) Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow. New York: Routledge, pp. 143–165.

44.

Saito

(2003) Global city formation in a capitalist developmental state: Tokyo and the waterfront sub-centre project. Urban Studies 40(2): 283–308.

45.

Sandercock

Dovey

(2002) Pleasure, politics and the ‘public interest’: Melbourne’s riverscape revitalization. Journal of the American Planning Association 68: 151–164.

46.

Schaller

Novy

(2011) New York City’s waterfronts as strategic sites for analyzing neoliberalism and its contestations. In: Desfor

Laidley

Stevens

, et al. (eds) Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow. New York: Routledge, pp. 166–187.

47.

Schouten

(2013) The materiality of state failure: Social contract theory, infrastructure and governmental power in Congo. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3): 553–574.

48.

Sewerage System Office (2019) Popularity rate of the households of Taipei City connected with sewerage. Public Works Department, Taipei City Government. Available at: https://www.sso.gov.taipei/ (accessed 20 September 2019).

49.

Smith

(2013) City Water, City Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

50.

Summitt

(2013) Contested Waters: An Environmental History of the Colorado River. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

51.

Swyngedouw

(2004) Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

52.

Taiwan Historica (2000) The History of Water Resources in Taiwan, Vol. 4. Nantou City: Taiwan Historica (in Chinese).

53.

Tvedt

(2004) The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

54.

Wang

Lee

(2015) Towards green gentrification? A preliminary enquiry of the waterfront housing development in the Taipei Metropolitan Area. Review of Social Sciences 9(2): 31–88.

55.

Wang

Huang

Lee

(2014) Transformation of the waterfront’s meaning and function in the Taipei Metropolitan Area. Journal of Geographical Science 74: 63–84 (in Chinese).

56.

Worster

(1992) Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

57.

Chang

(2012) The waterfront cultural landscape: From the sacred landscape of XiZhou Tribe to the riverfront planning of Dan Shui River. Journal of Wetlands 1(2): 49–66 (in Chinese).