Whose "Creativities"? How "Culturalized"? --Deconstructing the Cultural Governance of Taipei''s Urban/Culture Policies (1999-2015)

• Main Authors: Wen-Hua Lai, 賴彣華
• Other Authors: Ming-Tsung Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/60524450168632909138

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 社會學研究所 === 104 === This thesis deals with the issue of why and how municipal government has to deploy culture, aesthetic projects and creative city agenda as urban policy programmes and strategies. In particular, why do the urban space policies ‘culturalise’ themselves to drive urban (re)development? How are cultural policies and creative concepts linked with urban governance, and how do they contribute to the (re)construction of urban space? More specifically, how are creativity-related notions understood and adopted differently by the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and the Urban Regeneration Office (URO) of Taipei to achieve certain purposes and thereby reshape our urban culture? My research points out that the DCA, whose cultural policy is supposed to foster cultural industries, recreating the city’s image and stimulating the symbolic economy, is overemphasising the promotion of the so-called ‘creative quarter’, encouraging ‘creative consumption’ and developing a ‘creative industrial park’. This transition may arguably result in making artists and creative workers potentially subject to gentrification and consequently reduce creativity in the city. On the other hand, I argue that urban creativity strategies are being developed and implemented by the URO to increase the pace of urban renewal in the inner city and rejuvenate decaying neighbourhoods. Public investments, such as urban regeneration stations, creative industry clusters and creative city agendas, were introduced to fulfill the potential of urban gentrification and were designed to encourage urban redevelopment. In other words, unlike the cultural policy of the DCA, planning authorities set out to replace dilapidated houses and beautify the city by producing culture-led regeneration. By examining the change of cultural policies, and unpacking the myth of creative city narratives and their practices, it can be seen that the imported ‘urban creativity strategies’ were redefined and localised in Taiwan in a very different and exclusive way. The two departments may have adopted creative notions in order to achieve their own goals of governance from different points of view. However, such cultural policies stimulated middle-class-oriented urban cultural consumption, with trendy ‘hipster’ lifestyles, rising residential property values and neighbourhood gentrification, which may also contribute to culture-led regeneration as well as spatial and cultural change.