Heritage as city vision leverage: the suspended transformation of the railway landscape in Changhua City

ABSTRACT

This paper shows how heritage can become leverage working against the pro-growth city vision. In most cases, historic preservation in urban areas can hardly combat the dominant developmentalist ideology. The heritage thus produced may exacerbate uneven development, or simply be utilised as a cultural commodity. The case of Changhua City in Taiwan, however, proves otherwise. Through its 30-year controversies concerning the railway infrastructure, we show how the local government’s redevelopment vision since the 1990s can be gradually shifted, and that the secondary position of Changhua, plus the socio-materiality tied by three preservation movements upon the railway landscape, has made such shift possible. Drawing on planning reports and interviews with preservationists, we analyse how the static cityscape, though frustrating to developers and preservationists alike, has actually produced the kind of time-space required for civic life to develop, and for heritage to be lived as ordinary everyday life. With this case, we hope to contribute to the rethinking of heritage’s role in relation to the urban development.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmentalism
• infrastructure
• railway heritage
• ordinary cities
• social transformation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. However, the bill to corporatize TRA has finally been passed in May 2022. It is expected that TRA will be turned into a company after 2024.

2. Cultural Heritage Preservation Act. of Taiwan was first published in 1982, and has underwent two major amendments in 2005 and 2016 respectively, both when DPP was ruling. The 1982 version prioritises artefacts – such as those in the National Palace Museum. DPP’s later versions, on the contrary, emphasise settlements and landscapes, as well as intangible folk lifestyles.

3. The first railway verticalisation project in Taiwan was Taipei Railway Underground Project. Starting from the early 1980s, the project was initiated to release the traffic congestion of the highly urbanised capital, and was implemented in coordination with the contemporaneous construction of Taipei MRT – a Taipei experience influential to the vision shaping of other cities.

4. For the industrial land to be rezoned into commercial or residential one, part of the land has to be given back to the government as royalty. Changhua County Government uses this presumed royalty share to exchange with TRA’s land of dormitory, so as to have a land plot for park.

5. Many locals believe a county councilor had cooperated with local developers to facilitate the proposal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan [grant number MOST 107-2410-H-002-189].

Notes on contributors

Yu-Ting Kao

Yu-ting Kao is a postdoctoral scholar in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She has a PhD in Building and Planning from the National Taiwan University. Her research interests include cultural governance, human-animal relationship, and living systems in small cities.

Chih-Hung Wang

Chih-Hung Wang is a Professor of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. He obtained his PhD in 1997 in National Taiwan University. His field of study includes urban cultural governance, nature governance and mobility studies.