Cultivating gardens raises the quality of life for city dwellers.
One of the first urban gardens in Taipei City was established in 1990 by Wu Chin-cheng (吳金正), who divided land he had inherited in Beitou District into a number of smaller plots to rent to local residents. In the following years more landowners followed suit in the neighboring district of Shilin and other areas of the capital, and the city government’s Agricultural Development Division (ADD) offered tools and advice to hobby gardeners. In New Taipei City, the country’s most populated metropolis, there are now urban agriculture plots in Shulin, Tamsui, Tucheng and Xindian districts run with assistance from the city government’s Agriculture Bureau (AB). Data from last October records 2.37 hectares being leased to 371 people who cultivated vegetables for their own use or for donation to local social welfare groups.
A vacant space in Taipei’s Shilin District is used as a garden for vegetables and herbs. (Courtesy Of Chen Hui-mei)
Gardening has since extended from the suburbs to downtown areas, due in part to competitions for community groups, civil organizations and borough offices arranged by the AB since 2011. Commissioner Chen Shi-hui (諶錫輝) noted there were around 1,600 sites within the city as of December 2025. “We encourage the development of urban gardens for a wealth of reasons, including their capacity to reduce carbon emissions, produce a little fresh food and provide enjoyment for amateur growers,” he said. The Garden City Project (GCP) was launched in 2015 to integrate horticulture into Taipei’s urban communities. “Advocating for gardening space in the capital is a strategy to improve the city’s environment and contribute to civic participation,” ADD Chief Lu Chiou-hung (呂丘鴻) said. “We encourage the use of vacant private and public spaces as gardens for vegetables and herbs to green the city and increase residents’ social interaction and environmental awareness.”
Urban gardeners in Taipei and New Taipei cities grow crops like roselle, popular for making tea, and passion fruit, which is tolerant of heat. (Courtesy Of Chen Hui-mei)
Extensive Growth
By December 2025 the ADD reported around 750 gardens totaling more than 200,000 square meters that had been started under the GCP in community lots, on rooftops, in park corners, on school campuses and other public spaces, with thousands of people involved. Government-affiliated specialists offered enthusiasts classes on subjects including plant growth, ecology and food nutrients, as well as arranging community exchange visits and observation trips to horticultural venues. “The GCP sites are part of Taipei’s agro-landscape network,” Lu noted, referencing a chain comprising larger spaces such as terraced fields growing calla lilies in Beitou, rice growers on the Guandu plain and more than a dozen strawberry leisure farms in eastern Taipei’s Neihu District.
The environmental benefits of urban agriculture include green coverage, rainwater management and provision of wildlife habitats, Lu said, as well as mitigation of the urban heat-island effect and reduction of carbon emissions. Chen Hui-mei (陳惠美), professor in National Taiwan University’s College of Bioresources and Agriculture and head of the college’s Green Health Research Center, praised the city government’s policy and subsidies. The center, established in 2024 with support from the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), undertakes tasks like modeling 3D urban cooling and climate adaptive planning to simulate how the arrangement of plant life and buildings affects wind, temperature, air quality and human health.
Local residents turn over the soil at a community garden in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District. (Courtesy Of Chen Hui-mei)
Chen Hui-mei cited Guandu’s rice paddies in the north of the Taipei basin near the conjunction of the Keelung and Tamsui Rivers as favorable for the capital’s environment. She explained that these contribute to a critical ventilation corridor. “If the plain were to be filled with construction, wind off the Tamsui River would be blocked, making inner-city districts like Daan much hotter,” she said. Another benefit is local food security in the case of disruptions to the city’s supply chains from central or southern rural regions due to natural disasters. She characterized this as a universal problem: “More than 60 percent of the world’s 8 billion people reside in urban areas that account for just 3 percent of all land.”
The professor consults and works on evaluation committees for ADD- and AB-subsidized programs and competitions, and she emphasized the importance of incorporating landscaping into plots, drawing from kitchen gardens in the French potager style, which blends vegetables, herbs and flowers into an aesthetic arrangement. She also pointed to therapeutic horticulture offered in ongoing programs like the MOA’s Green Care in Agriculture for the older demographic. “There’s great potential for the medical sector to incorporate social and nature-based prescriptions into patient care, as we’ve seen in Taipei City Hospital network projects.” Venues prescribed for patients with cardiovascular disease and depression include cultural centers, art museums and the Taipei Botanical Garden. “Community farms are also ideal,” she said.
The Donghu library’s rooftop garden has a shady walkway of climbing bitter melons and loofahs. (Courtesy of ADD)
Tangible Benefits
Gardening also contributes to an understanding of the challenges of, and respect for, food production. “Urban areas account for a much greater share of food consumption and can benefit from education about food’s journey from farm to table,” said Chen Hui-mei. “The importance of growing techniques, elements like climate, soil and water supply, in addition to the effect that crops themselves have on the environment, are as important as knowledge of cooking.” The Taipei and New Taipei city governments established promotional committees comprising representatives from agriculture, education, public health and environmental protection departments under the Food and Agricultural Education Act, implemented in 2022 and aimed at both students and the general public. This demonstrates government commitment to enhancing public awareness of dietary links to the environment and industrial agriculture, according to Chen Shi-hui. There are many AB-recognized food and horticulture education sites in New Taipei’s downtown and suburban areas designed for elementary and high school students, he said.
Chen Hui-mei pointed out that for Taipei, New Taipei and other metropolitan areas, horticulture activities are evaluated not by production volumes or market profits, but rather by their educational, environmental and healing value. “These diverse gains must be taken into consideration alongside advocacy for urban gardens,” she said. “The essence of this sort of cultivation is the way it contributes to a more healthful, soothing city life.”
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw