ABSTRACT
It is an often stated truism that planning is politics, meaning that all planning decisions are political in concept and form since they affect different people differently – some gain from such decisions and some lose. The situation in Taiwan is of course no different. However, for Taiwan, there is a rather different relationship between politics and spatial planning that is peculiar to this territory and relates to its particular and unique political situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an issue first discussed in Chapter 1 and reinforced in Chapters 3 and 4, but still worth reiterating here. The particular situation referred to pervades all contemporary politics in Taiwan and thus affects planning decisions as much as any other policy area within national and local governance. This uniqueness can be divided into two – the conceptualization of current political governance in Taiwan and the influence of the so-called ‘cross-strait relationship’.
