Wang, Chih-hung and Chun-hsiu Lin (2012). The un/making of natures in urban green areas: the case of Urchong Floodway in New Taipei City. In Yukio Nishimura and Christian Dimmer (eds), Planning for Sustainable Asian Cities: APSA 2011 Selected Papers (pp. 238-249). Tokyo.
Abstract
City is not far away form nature, but is part of the tension-ridden city-nature formation. Through a case study of a floodway’s transformation into an urban green belt, this article tries to examine the making and unmaking of multiple natures that planners need to deal with. In the process, natures and waters had been excluded or ignored, or kept under control, but recently gradually been highly emphasized and conserved, and became a core element in the newly urban development.
The Erchong Floodway was built as an answer to the flooding problem of the Taipei metropolitan area. The construction covered the drains, wetlands and agricultural land on the edge of urban area, and causing furious struggles since several villages on the site were demolished. After the floodway was completed, the extensive embankment and lands for flood became an ungovernable urban margin where people occupied illegally for vegetable-farming or garbage disposal. Since 1992, the government started to regulate the floodway and flood plains of the Danshuei River, removing the dumping grounds, setting up sport facilities, and commencing the landscape engineering. By 2004, in total 9.7 square kilometers riverside green land has been developed and a largest riverside urban park in Taiwan was under planning, which will provide sites for leisure activities and ecological conservation as well as flooding control. Under the new planning initiatives and reshaping of human-nature relationship, the Erchong Floodway has been transformed from an urban periphery to an green axis that promoted urban renewal, and acted as a typical case for examining the making and unmaking of natures in urban processes.
This research found there were several types of “nature” in the Erchong Floodway which emerged along the path of urban change. Firstly, before the 1980s, the nature was tamed resource that embodied as agricultural land at the edge of urban area. After the construction of floodway since 1982, the nature/water was treated as dangerous object in need of scientific control, and as wildness outside the dike. However, the ungoverned wildness has become a vigorous place for lower class people with informal activities like vegetable-farms, altars, night market and flea market. Furthermore, the open floodway and embankment was an ideal channel for highways in the intensely developed urban area. These elements together constituted a city-formation characterized as a marginal landscape. Since the 1990s, as the riverside park, bikeways and other recreational facilities were built, the nature has been transformed into a disciplined riverfront leisure place which catered to the middle-class’ demand for urban spaces of cleanness and safety. Meanwhile, environmental conservation groups were also introduced by the local government to manage the wetlands. The consequence was the increasing land price in surrounding area, and thus the nature also has a role in the recent wave of real property development.
The various meanings of natures reveal the multiple human-natures relationships under different stages of urban governance and planning policies. We can see human and natural factors weaving together in space production along, involving a play out of politics of exclusion and inclusion, and practices of boundary-marking and transgression as well. It is believed that this complex city-nature formation should be in the views of planners.