ABSTRACT
This book is not only a study of post-war urban Taiwan but also of the urban Asia Pacific. The study’s analytical perspectives reflect the architectural and urban evolution of Asia Pacific and its history from several points of view as well as the purely architectural. The book aims to explore a social, cultural and political problem which was chaotic and suppressed in the past but whose solution is emerging to provide a significant and systematic order within architecture and urbanism today. With this in mind, the study assesses the context, relevant theoretical issues and forms of high culture, and depicts how a once gloomy popular culture in Taiwan has given way to a vibrant and self-confident flowering of identity in the island’s society and its architecture. Taiwan reflects this phenomenon in its spatial practices of regeneration, and those practices are rooted in the new ideas and the ‘community and quotidian’ conceptions that have made it possible to discard the old colonial and nationalist imagery of the typical, and once widely accepted, ‘Taipei model’.
