When the Hung Kuo Group, a leading real estate developer on Taiwan, began advertising its latest residential project in July 1991, company executives kept their expectations modest. The plan looked solid: The ambitious US$380 million project, dubbed "Hung Kuo Big Town," featured first-class design, top-quality construction materials, and such marketable extras as a spacious central square and underground parking lots. In addition, units were priced at a reasonable US$ 189,000 per 1,080 square-foot apartment. But the size and location of the place worried Hung Kuo's management.
The complex was to be located in Hsichih, an industrial town three kilometers outside Taipei city limits, which was better known as a place for factories and shipping company container parks than for luxury condos. With twelve 24-story buildings and a total of 1,755 units to fill, the Hung Kuo managers anticipated that it would take several years to sell the project.
Where's the sidewalk? Urban pedestrians compete with cars, motorcycles, vendors, and store displays for walking space.
They were wrong. Even though the buildings were not yet constructed, the first four Big Town buildings on the market sold out in forty-eight hours, which prompted the company to begin sales on another set of buildings. Hungry buyers snapped up the second batch in a matter of days. In the end, Hung Kuo sold all 1,755 units in a single month.
While the success of Hung Kuo Big Town can be attributed in part to the merits of the project itself, the lightening speed of its sale also underscores the rapid expansion of metropolitan Taipei into surrounding towns. Hsichih is simply the latest in a string of outlying areas to fall prey to fast-growing Taipei. In the past thirty years, Taipei has mushroomed from 1.8 million residents, which was 16 percent of Taiwan's population in 1961, to 5.74 million, 28 percent of today's population. In the process, the capital city has swallowed up many peripheral towns, including Hsintien, Panchiao, Yungho, Chungho, Sanchung, and Hsinchuang. All of these are now considered suburbs of Taipei.
Rush hour is crawl hour—commuter traffic from surrounding areas intensifies Taipei's already high concentration of vehicles.
The expansion of metropolitan Taipei is just part of an islandwide process of urbanization. The southern metropolis of Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second largest city, is fast outgrowing its boundaries. For example, Kaohsiung's Aotzuti district has been occupied mainly by rice paddies and sawmills for several generations. That changed in the early 1980s with the building of a drainage system and other public facilities. The newly accessible area became a target for Kaohsiung developers. Numerous high-rise office and residential buildings sprang up, and Aotzuti land prices skyrocketed by several hundred percent. Meanwhile, in the farming village of Niaosung, just northeast of Kaohsiung, rows of luxury town houses have mushroomed along the road near Chengching Lake, a scenic resort area. These housing developments have eaten up so much of the land in the area that the government was forced to abandon its plans to develop a large commercial and residential center there as part of the Six-Year National Development Plan.
Urbanization is nothing new on Taiwan. The trend has been under way for decades, but the pace has picked up in the past few years. In 1961, the island's urban population stood at 5.7 million, just over half the total population. By the end of 1990, however, the urban population had soared to 15.6 million, or three-fourths of the island's population. In the past three decades, the number of municipalities with more than 50,000 residents rose from thirty-two to eighty-seven. At the same time, the population of the island's three metropolises—Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung—increased from 3.2 million to 9.4 million, growing from 29 percent to 46 percent of the population.
An old-style Chinese home in downtown Taipei—traditional ways of life are threatened by rapid urban development.
Development in Taiwan's rural and suburban areas often follows a predictable pattern. As a city expands, factories, stores, and residential buildings sprout up at its outskirts. The new businesses attract new people, the new people attract new businesses, and a snowball effect is set in motion. Finally, with construction of convenient transportation routes, the town becomes, for all intents and purposes, a suburb of the nearby metropolis.
Development often leads to a predictable set of problems. Without careful planning, an area's green fields and other open areas are quickly transformed into rows of cement buildings. At the same time, new growth seriously strains the existing infrastructure, leading to traffic jams, pollution, insufficient water and sewage systems, and a general sense of deteriorating social order. In addition, the increased population sends housing prices sky-high, often far beyond the reach of average salary earners in the area.
A trip through the townships and rural areas of Taipei county, where over 20 percent of the island's factories are located, vividly illustrates these problems. In such towns surrounding Taipei as Sanchung, Yungho, and Panchiao, traffic clogs the roads nearly all day, houses and factories jumble together in the narrow neighborhoods, garbage piles up along the riverbanks, and the sky is almost always veiled by smog.
The flip side to Taiwan's urbanization woes is that rural areas are also suffering from a changing economic order. Throughout the island, rural communities are losing population and experiencing a general decline in output, a problem aggravated in part by the flood of imported agricultural products now available in the market. Over the past fifteen years, the contribution of agricultural output to the island's GNP plunged from 11 percent in 1976 to 4 percent in 1990. Meanwhile, the 1990 average income for rural families, US$15,710, was just 79 percent of the income of urban families. In rural counties, including Yunlin, Chiayi, Taitung, Hualien, Ilan, and Penghu, the tax revenue of local governments cannot pay county payrolls, let alone fund public facilities.
Addressing the problems that have arisen in both urban and rural areas is a primary goal outlined in the government's Six-Year National Development Plan. One major goal is to construct an islandwide transportation network, including the Taipei-Ilan Freeway, the high-speed railway linking Taipei and Kaohsiung, and the second northern freeway. These transportation projects, along with the recently completed south-bend railway (which connects Pingtung county in the south and Taitung county in the east), will form a transportation network enabling travelers to encircle the island in just thirteen hours.
Work in the city, shop at home—Kangshan residents prefer this traditional night market over shops in nearby Kaohsiung.
Another government strategy geared to ease the transition to a predominantly urban population is the development of so-called new towns. These are combined residential and commercial developments equipped with schools, hospitals, recreational facilities, and businesses. In Linkou, on the western outskirts of Taipei, such a project began ten years ago and is still underway. Built primarily as a bedroom community for Taipei, the project aims to increase the town's population from 70,000 to 200,000 in five years. Its ultimate goal is a population of 450,000 residents. The government is planning a second development northwest of Taipei in the old riverside town of Tamsui, as well as four new towns in southern Taiwan that will accommodate a total of 1 million residents.
Finally, the government's third strategy is to develop a network of industrial zones around the island. One such targeted town is Hsinchu, eighty kilometers south of Taipei. In addition to the existing Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, which covers 1,000 acres and houses 134 companies, the government will build a second industrial park, and cultural and recreational facilities to serve the needs of a projected population of 1 million.
Further south, a major project is underway to build an industrial zone on 39,500 acres of landfilled area in Yunlin county. The zone will accommodate heavy industry such as metals and petrochemicals as well as the island's sixth naphtha-cracking plant, to be built by the Formosa Plastics Group. The region is expected to create 12,000 jobs. Two other industrial zones, built in Changhua and Chiayi counties, will house middle- and down-stream industries, creating employment for an estimated 85,000.
The development of convenient transportation networks, new towns, and industrial zones are all part of the government's plan to develop a network of eighteen "life circles," or regional development areas around the island. Each of these will include an industrial complex along with the services and facilities necessary for a comfortable living environment. A total of 900,000 new housing units will be built during the six-year period to achieve the goal of home ownership for 80 percent of the population. Each will offer transportation, housing, parking, water, schools, medical facilities, supermarkets, and shopping centers.
Under the plan, residents will find a swimming pool and sports area, library, and adult education center in every village; a playground in every borough (Taiwan's second smallest administrative unit); and museums and theaters in every town center. Towns of more than 50,000 residents will have a system of roads that link into the freeway network; cities of more than 100,000 will have an expressway network; and each metropolis of more than 1 million will have a mass rapid transit system. Ideally, residents will be able to drive to the central city of their life circle within half an hour, and to the nearest metropolis within one hour.
These ideal communities still seem a long way from the real problems faced by newly urbanized areas around the island. In the midst of incessant traffic jams, widespread construction, and diminishing green spaces in rural and suburban areas, there is a long way to go before Taiwan can achieve a more balanced process of urbanization.—Philip Liu (劉柏登) is editor-in-chief of Business Taiwan, an English-language weekly published in Taipei.