Ever since the ROC government formally approved the “Plan for Developing Taiwan as an Asia-Pacific Regional Operation Center” (the APROC plan), Taipei has been in the hot seat. The city, despite being at the heart of the island’s political and economic action, is in many ways an unattractive place.The cityscape is marred by large tracts of undistinguished architecture; streets are clogged with traffic and littered with refuse; inner-city recreational and green areas are sorely limited; and a significant portion of the laws, regulations, and bureaucratic structures seem designed to discourage aboveboard entrepreneurial activities.
One tremendous strength of Taipei, however, is that whatever a visitor may say in criticism of the place has already been voiced publicly—and frequently—by its own residents and media. If the first step to solving problems is to acknowledge that they exist, Taipei has a solid record.
And it’s getting better. Taipei Mayor Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and the staff of the city’s Department of Urban Development recently concluded several months of roundtable meetings with the media and prominent local and expatriate residents. The forums provided a no-holds-barred assessment of what’s right and what’s wrong with the city. The goal was to find out how to make Taipei an attractive location for multinational corporations in the areas of manufacturing, media, air and sea transportation, financial services, and telecommunications—industries specifically targeted by the APROC plan. Detailed summaries of the meetings were distributed to the public, and the participants’ suggestions were incorporated into the comprehensive “Taipei City Internationalization Strategy and Promotional Plan.”
Then, in mid-April, the city held a two-day “Conference on Strategies for an International City,” also characterized by straight talk. The city and four private sector co-organizers invited more than 250 delegates from fifteen countries to present papers and participate in a series of panels. The sessions also attracted hundreds of local residents to the open discussions. The overall purpose of the meeting was to encourage widespread understanding of the city’s new strategic plan, and to have experts assess how effective it might be in making Taipei more competitive than other international cities in the Asia-Pacific region.
It’s still too early for an overall evaluation of the city’s highly detailed plan, which is roughly divided into six strategic areas: strengthening infrastructure, improving urban life, creating a better business environment, building transnational links, and increasing the effectiveness of government administration. It was immediately clear, however, that the conference was a success. To the credit of the meeting’s organizers, the invited expertises were light on theory, heavy on practicality. Some highlights of the conference:
Where are we? What should we do?
Sensibly, the conference opened by asking, “What are we talking about, anyway? What is an international, or global, city?” The answers were varied, but a consensus was reached on several essential components. According to the opening speaker, Susan Fainstein, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy Development at Rutgers University, “Virtually all cities are now global cities, because of the impact of telecommunications, the media, international sales of brand-name products, and so on. But places like New York, London, and Tokyo still have an edge in specific areas, such as finance and law. Many cities have globalized functions, but only a few are global cities. Such places not only feel the effects of global forces, they also are the sites in which those forces are generated.” It’s that particular edge, that special niche, that can turn just another big city into a place that counts internationally.
The APROC plan, formally approved by the Executive Yuan (the Cabinet) in January 1995, specifically calls for attracting corporate headquarters to Taipei. But how important is this? Fainstein says that having multinationals set up offices is not the quintessential mark of an international city. “What is important is that it’s where the deals are made,” she says. “If a city has a critical mass of accountants, lawyers, and investment bankers, for instance, it’s on the way to being a financial center.”
What about the importance of putting up modern, high-tech buildings, along the line of those projected for Taipei’s financial center in the Hsinyi Planning District? Fainstein says that much more is needed than buildings to succeed. “A high concentration of business services is needed to support the deal-makers, as well as the corporate centers.” She suggests that when planners design a new business district, they should leave plenty of room for lowrent buildings and not squeeze out small support business, such as printers, office supply shops, copywriters, translators and interpreters, and advertising and multimedia experts. If such services are nearby—as well as restaurants, laundries, variety stores, pharmacies, and the like—large corporation offices will have the backup they require close at hand. This makes a business district especially attractive.
On the other hand, construction of high-cost buildings alone may give city planners the Asian equivalent of what London’s Canary Wharf developers faced at first: Lots of expensive, empty offices. “You have to be careful about putting limits on space when building,” Fainstein says. “You need a diversity of wealth and size of businesses close together in business districts, so it’s best to let the private sector dominate joint development of such districts, not government.”
People power
International cities are necessarily centers for the global generation and dissemination of information. “Openness makes a city a world city,” says Akira Tamura (田村明), a professor of political science at Hosei University, Japan. “In such places you need lots of exchange, a free flow of people and ideas. It must be a place where people can easily communicate with the rest of the world, so it has open doors to information.” At the same time, he warns, the shift to global status should not wipe out a city’s unique past; openness doesn’t mean loss of cultural antecedents. “Tokyo and Taipei face the same problem of over-Westernization and lack of distinct flavor,” he says.
That internationalization can blur local and even national distinctions is a trend already seen in the private sector. “The importance of national boundaries is evaporating for many businesses,” says Gary Hack, a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Look at their financing, telecommunications, advertising, and technological standards—these are spreading worldwide. Yet, at the same time, there is a great concentration of certain activities, such as financial centers and R&D parks. So each city must take a hard look at what it can do best, and what advantages it has. The critical issue for any global city is to find a focus.”
This process is helped along if a city has strong educational institutions. Susan Fainstein says that excellent universities, professional schools, and technical colleges are another important dimension of global cities. If these institutions cluster in and near the city, they can also attract a broad range of overseas students, who add to the city’s human resources. Yet another source of creative people is immigration, she adds, pointing out the strengths New York City gains from its rich ethnic diversity and continuing flow of new arrivals. “The larger the population of a city, the larger the number of creative people brought together,” she says. “And if such people are there, the business sector will naturally follow. You can make great plans for a city, but that doesn’t mean that people will come.”
Lucian Blazej, director of planning in the Planning Department, City and County of San Francisco, also emphasizes that corporations are attracted to a city if it’s a center of higher education and R&D. “People are ultimately the city,” he says. “An international city needs intellectual capital, and this is centered around universities.” He points out that San Francisco and the Bay Area draw great strength from being a multicultural melting pot with a high standard of education: 35 percent of the work force have a B.A. (the US national average is 18 percent), and 19 percent have a professional degree (national average: 9 percent). “The diversity of our human capital helps the city’s overall quality of life,” he says.
Information and Culture
What does Taipei have to offer the region and the world? Chang Jing-sen (張景森), director-general of the Department of Urban Development and the primary conference organizer, says: “Taipei must grab hold of a useful position. But what should it be?” One suggestion surfaced repeatedly during the conference sessions: Taipei could become a center for undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools that use Chinese as their primary or secondary language. Why? Because Taiwan has the greatest academic freedom in the Chinese-speaking world. Restrictions in Mainland China, Singapore, and most likely in Hong Kong after 1997, all make Taipei a particularly attractive alternative for the sort of free exchange of information and open discussion that is essential for genuine education.
A number of participants pointed out that Taipei has yet to take advantage of this potential educational dimension. They urged the city to consider becoming a focal point of interaction for Chinese language speakers, and the connection between these groups and the rest of the world. “It’s good to recall that people from Taiwan live all around the world, and this is a big potential asset,” says Henry Tsang (曾筱龍), Deputy Lord Mayor, Sydney city council, Australia. “Chinese people control 70 percent of the economic clout of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia—so make use of this fact, especially since Chinese are so good at networking in the Asia-Pacific region.” Lucian Blazej makes a related point: “Taipei can seek to build its intellectual capital by attracting the best people from Chinese areas,” he says. “But you also need a balance between education, arts and culture, and business. People need a balance between work and leisure.”
Cultivation of an international educational environment has other merits, as well, such as helping build a strong mass media. “An international populace helps promote a global outlook, which is strong component in developing a sophisticated media,” says Wea Chi-lin (魏啟林), a professor in the Graduate Institute of Business Administration at National Taiwan University. “Taipei has a strong possibility of becoming a media center, because there are no restrictions on the media. Moreover, this free atmosphere could also help Taipei become a center for Mandarin-language education, and thereby help preserve Chinese culture.”
Wea recommends that the city consider developing the areas around the National Palace Museum and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum as cultural centers: “We should draw on our existing strengths and sponsor more festivals with international appeal, such as film festivals, the annual lantern festival, and Chinese New Year events.” Professor Akira Tamura suggests other advantages of such activities.
“Hosting international activities can earn money for the city,” he says. “But more importantly, they help expose local residents to the world around them, broadening their contacts, concepts, interests, and understanding.”
Civic and cultural life
A strong education component not only attracts business to the city, it also improves the quality of life. “We have a high degree of citizen participation in government affairs, and we can draw upon the high sophistication of people in the Bay Area,” explains Lucian Blazej. “Working together is essential, not just for people in government, but everyone.”
Balzej’s point raises the importance of an active civic society in an international city. In Taipei, civic organizations have only begun to play a prominent role in society since restrictions on the formation and scope of such groups were eliminated with the passage of a new civic organizations law in the late 1980s. Previously, government organizations dominated the social fabric. So how can the growth of civic organizations (often called non-government organizations or NGOs) be stimulated in Taipei?
One possibility, according to Roger Simmonds, a professor of Town Planning at Oxford Brookes University in England, is to dismantle outmoded or ineffective government institutions. He gives an example from London: “The recent history of London has a lot to do with deconstruction, the undoing of things, rather than building,” he says. “One instance was the abolishment of the Greater London Council, a very strong organization, and its replacement with a weak jumble of agencies that worked for the various city boroughs. There was a big drop in administrative personnel, a streamlining of functions, and more room for innovative, cooperative, and competitive efforts between the city’s boroughs. The voluntary sector also became very important. The results were dramatic. One was that the combination of private sector, government, and volunteer groups brought about a new way of managing the city. London went from a hierarchy to a network, one that emphasizes a bottom-up system of government that’s closer to the citizenry. So don’t underestimate the importance of deconstruction, of undoing things that simply don’t work any more.”
Lucien Blazej also says that it’s best to deal with city issues at the lowest possible level. “Give more room to local governments to work out problems, instead of having a huge central government that leans on everyone,” he suggests. Chang Fu-mei (張富美), director, Commission for Examining Petitions and Appeals, Taipei city government, points out another important role of civic organizations in smoothing the process of government administration: “If the [ROC] legislature passes a law that negatively affects business, there really is no efficient mechanism, like the US Congressional Research Office or NGOs and think tanks, that help gather, assess, and present feedback to the government on laws so they can be refined. In fact, this is a problem at all government levels.”
Yet, not all important deconstruction in the city need be administrative. “I’m interested in city survivability,” Henry Tsang says. “Sydney puts great emphasis on the environment. Many tall buildings look the same throughout the world, thanks to the styles that prevailed during the 1980s. So we tore down some of ours in Sydney and put up more unique and attractive structures. We were also concerned that the visual lines of the city were being ruined by elevated freeways, and we’ve torn down a few of them as well. Akira Tamura says that Japanese cities are following a similar tack. “One trend in Japan is to put more things underground, including expressways,” he says. “We don’t want our cities to be dissected by freeways.”
Such urban problems are clearly not restricted to Taipei. “When we compare cities around the world, we learn that many problems are the same,” says Yukio Nishimura (西村幸夫), a professor at Tokyo University. “We note a major shift everywhere when a place moves from bicycles to cars. Vietnam is a recent example.”
Nishimura stresses the importance of balancing a city’s internationalization with cultural preservation. “Local culture and townscapes are interrelated,” he says. “A city needs to save its personality, its uniqueness. Asian streets are different from those in the West. We need to keep them thriving. For instance, shophouses [with businesses on the ground floor and residences above] are found Singapore, Malaysia, Taipei, and elsewhere in the region—the style originated in southern China. Our challenge today is to develop these structures in a modern setting.”
Another feature many Asian cities have in common is that traditionally they have a water-based culture. They were built along rivers, canals, the seashore. Therefore, in modernizing cities such as Bangkok and Taipei, cleaning canals and rivers is extremely important in the modernization process. If the canals are eliminated, for instance, it changes the social and cultural orientation of many neighborhoods. “Unfortunately, rivers and canals often become sewers, and thereby lose much of their value,” Nishimura says. “But in fact, they have great potential, and they can be rejuvenated. During modernization, townscapes can be upgraded, and in the process people can save their unique culture and their local pride. Nishimura’s presentation illustrated this fact with examples throughout Asia of neighborhoods recapturing their past by cleaning up their surroundings and retaining the cultural ideas of space and boundaries that make their living environments unique. “Gates, fences, gardens—all these traditional forms can be enhanced by modern development,” Nishimura says, “but they should not be eliminated.”
Taipei’s traffic congestion wastes time and fuel, increases pollution and noise, and contributes heavily to everyone’s stress. The mass transit system will help, but it’s taking a long time to open for business.
Looking ahead
Does the competition among Asia-Pacific cities to become regional centers have a positive dimension? Alven H.S. Lam (林雄生), a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in the United States, says that Asian cities should seek to learn from each other, and to cooperate more. “You need to look at each city’s strengths: what does it do best?” he says. “Genuine global cities are exciting, interesting places to live. Entertainment, cultural events, and international sports events, conferences, and trade fairs—these are all marks of quality, and they’re ways to build overseas links and tolerance for other points of view. When a city internationalizes, it should seek more exposure and develop a unique image. But it should also link with others.” The suggestion reinforces a policy already being pursued by the Taipei city government: It has signed more than thirty sister-city agreements with major metropolitan centers around the world.
K.S. Pun (潘國城), director of the Hong Kong government’s Planning Department takes a larger view, referring to the numerous projections of continued economic growth throughout Asia and the Pacific. “Many cities in this region are trying to become operations centers,” he says. “People are saying we are competing too much, that we should each be taking small pieces of the pie. But in fact, the pie is big enough for everyone.”
Several local commentators at the conference sessions pointed out that Taipei’s ambitious internationalization strategy and promotional plan is an important step in giving it the power to cut itself a bigger piece of the action. One essential ingredient for success is an aggressively positive mentality, says Paul S.P. Hsu ( 徐小波), a senior partner at Lee and Li, Attorneys-at-Law. “Taiwan’s success has come from the private sector,” he says, “but this vitality has not been used enough by the government. We need to pull together our private and governmental resources, and build a consensus for change. We also must avoid being negative about new ideas, because negativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, we in Taipei must agree to work together, and to be positive about our view of the future.”