Negotiating Urban Greening Through Housing Development: Stakeholders and Sociospatial Strategies in a Municipality-Led Eco-Building Programme

ABSTRACT

Existing studies neglect the state-society relations in urban greening, particularly as mediated by residential greening practices. This article fills this gap by investigating the Taichung City Liveable Building (TCLB) programme as a case study of municipality-led eco-housing development, detailing how a municipal government and the real estate sector may collaborate to develop specific housing complexes that incorporate abundant vertical greenery into their built forms. Drawing upon the territory, place, scale, and network (TPSN) framework, this study explores how stakeholders negotiate the politics of greening interventions able to balance competing interests, and it parses out housing-facilitated greening strategies informed by the planning and development of TCLBs. This article reveals the polymorphic power relations deployed around the regime and practices of eco-housing production, suggesting how heterogeneous stakeholders with seemingly disparate aspirations can indeed collaborate to negotiate urban greening through housing development. The conclusions reiterate the significance of this case study and summarize policy takeaways.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological housing
• greening interventions
• TPSN
• sociospatial strategies
• local state

Introduction

The existing social theory on urban greening uses a critical perspective mainly observing how different state-led greening initiatives increase private property prices at the expense of displaced, disadvantaged populations (Caprotti 2014; Checker 2011). A set of related concepts, such as urban green grabbing (Melissa et al. 2022), ecological gentrification (Dooling 2009), and green locally unwanted land use (LULU) (Anguelovski 2016), characterizes the pro-growth and exclusionary features of urban greening interventions. As insightful as those arguments are, many scholars tend to treat the natural (what constitutes the green in urban greening) and built environments (which is remade by the green component that is itself subject to architectural influences) as two mutually defined yet separate entities. Despite the prevailing theme of urban property rights and value in discussing green space, the process and mechanisms of the real estate market in creating green spaces are given limited attention (cf. Blomley 2004; Rigolon, Stewart and Gobster 2020). Additionally, there exists only a modest level of theoretical discussion about the state-society relations in urban greening, although an increasing number of state-led greening interventions that leverage private capital have emerged internationally (Beuschel and Rudel 2009; Chung, Zhang and Wu 2018; Rigolon, Stewart and Gobster 2020). This article aims to narrow these gaps by investigating an underexplored form of urban greening: vertical greening by looking into a municipality-led eco-housing programme, the Taichung City Liveable Building (TCLB) in Taiwan. I explore how a municipality directs new housing designs to promote a greener city along its growth trajectory. A presumed paradox between property development and urban greening justifies an analytic perspective centred on a strategic-relational state power (Jessop 2008) mobilized to balance competing and yet mutually constitutive forces deployed in an eco-building regime. To explore how stakeholders collaborate and negotiate the politics and built forms of greening interventions, the analysis adopts the territory, place, scale and network (TPSN) framework (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008) to identify the key strategies that the stakeholders use to operationalize the programme itself while embedding it in the urban planning context. Specifically, I distinguish land planning and property development as two sociospatial nexuses of governance centred on the ideas of place and network, respectively. The nexus of development correlates with three types of operating strategies, showing how eco-housing is co-produced by key stakeholders to negotiate and compromise on the urban greening agenda. The article is structured as follows: it begins with a theoretical overview of state-society relations in urban greening politics and how they relate to housing development. A brief history of urban development and political context is then introduced. A theoretically driven analysis of the empirical data comprises two parts: one examines the planning of TCLBs, and the other explores its development regime. The concluding remarks reiterate the significance of applying a TPSN framework to this case study while reflecting on its limits.

State-Society Relations in Urban Greening Intervention

Greening Regime and Housing Development

Urban greening is defined as “the planning and management of all urban vegetation to create or add values to the local community in an urban area” (Konijnendijk and Randrup, 2002, 2). Although public, private, or civic groups can initiate greening interventions, the local government remains a pivotal actor coordinating vegetated greening at the urban scale (cf. While, Jonas, and Gibbs 2004; Kronsell and Mukhtar-Landgren 2018). Studies addressing state intervention in large-scale urban greening started with critics of urban sustainability fix in post-industrial cities (While, Jonas, and Gibbs 2004). In the face of global climate change advocacy, scholars currently position urban greening as a multi-scalar practice beyond local decision-making or a regional vision of sustainability; rather, they position it in terms of global climate governance (Verheij and Corrêa Nunes 2021). Regarding the private sector, a body of greening scholarship foregrounds the power of private stakeholders (developers and financial lenders) to produce green space to boost property values (Melissa et al. 2021, 2022). More recently, studies have eschewed a conceptual dichotomy assuming the “green producer” as either an aspiring state or a speculative market and, instead, have conceptualized the contingent and multi-directional interaction among capitalists, local states, and place-based civil societies (Chung, Zhang and Wu 2018; Rigolon, Stewart and Gobster 2020). While real estate market participants appropriate the green value provided by government-subsidized parks and green amenities to accumulate wealth while displacing poor individuals (Angelo 2019; Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2016; Melissa et al. 2021), in some cases, local or central states also leverage private property to promote urban greening across geopolitical contexts. For example, in a New Jersey suburb in the US, local real estate developers donate a parcel of their property as a compromise with respect to municipal greening or protected land restriction, or they simply exchange extra lots or other bonuses (Beuschel and Rudel 2009). In shrinking American cities, municipalities transfer city-owned vacant lots to private ownership to increase property taxes, empower the community, and stabilize real estate markets as a solution to urban blight (LaCroix 2010; Rigolon et al. 2020). In China, a state-led cross-regional greenway project is created in a manner that is adaptive to the joint needs of municipal land quotas, rural land use claims and real estate development (Chung, Zhang, and Wu 2018).

As cities pursue compact land uses to avoid urban sprawl and an over-exploitation of ecological resources (Jim 2013) while making compromises to acquire land, many municipalities now turn to policy initiatives aimed at vertical greening. Vertical greening techniques have brought the significance of building-plant relationships to the forefront. The trend towards vertical greening started in public building design or state-led planning projects across different geopolitical contexts, when municipalities or a local state demonstrated its leadership in the field of low-carbon transition by constructing green roofs or living walls in public facilities, infrastructure and eco-towns (Cidell 2017; Pow 2018; Schröpfer 2016). To scale up the greening effect, private property is able to contribute to a more extensive degree of urban greening. Most such cases in the West occur in private real estate markets, thus representing a new line of luxurious housing products.¹ However, the local governments of an increasing number of cities in the Global South, particularly those seeking a transition to being low-carbon cities, are keen to demonstrate leadership in developing ecological buildings to green their cities.

State-led vertical greening policy incentivizes developers through subsidies, tax reductions, and low-rate loans and by awarding development rights to increase vegetation on residential buildings (cf. Dilworth and Stokes 2013; Li, Hu and Zhong 2019). Given that housing greening initiatives require reconfiguring the interrelationship among built forms, housing programmes, state subsidies and land uses for an alternative building regime supporting an assemblage of built and green areas, their development and maintenance necessarily involve a hybrid body of stakeholders and a polymorphic exploration of state-society dynamics (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008). Given that existing scholarship on urban greening remains focused on ground-level greening, such as parks and green ways, analyses of state power and state-society relations for teasing out the nuances in vertical greening remain limited.

To determine ways to assemble these actors and integrate diverse interests, a local state-led vertical greening programme must embody power relations formed between the government and society. Jessop (2008) developed the strategic-relational approach (SRA) to explain this complex yet dialectical state-society relationship in performing state power. A capitalist state strategically engages with society to advance the economic interests underlying any state policy. Therefore, the state is best studied under the approach of social relations to parse out “the complexities of the actually existing state system” (Jessop 2016, 51). State power seeks balances of forces to achieve the optimum outcome through the formation of a pluralist structure. Capitalism, for example, needs to be mediated through an economic regime qualified in terms of a “strategic selectivity” capable of balancing different forces and interests (Jessop 2016). The SRA explains the flexibility of capitalism, thereby promising possibilities for eco-social change led by a capitalist state (Ioris 2012; Lin 2016; Quastel 2016). By objecting to the notion that growth-oriented capitalism determines state actions (Quastel 2016), a framework that incorporates the SRA thus offers an adjustment to the analysis of green economies via the strengthened analysis of civil society and social agency. To apply the SRA to examine space or place-based issues, scholars have spatialized it into a holistic framework named the TPSN framework.

The TPSN Framework

Jessop, Brenner and Jones (2008) extended the spatialization of the SRA to multi-scalar levels, ranging from the international and the national to the local, by exploring the nature of socio-spatial relations. They identified the territory, place, scale and network (TPSN) as four analytic dimensions for theorizing how state power becomes territorialized, spatially embedded, or polymorphically represented in terms of state spatial strategies in any capitalist restructuring process (cf. Brenner 2004, 2009; Jessop 2016). To explore space-based problems, the TPSN framework avoids unidimensionality, valuing cross-dimensional or multi-dimensional relations. Here, territory refers to bordering, bounding, parcelization, or enclosure that separates inside and outside. Place refers to proximity, spatial embedding, and areal differentiation horizontally distributing relations. Scale suggests that space has hierarchization and vertical differentiation. Network results in an inter-relational quality such as the interconnectivity, interdependence, and transversal differentiation of a subject (Jessop, Brenner and Jones, 2008). The TPSN framework can be summarized as an analytic matrix laying out different sociospatial dimensions (Table 1).

Table 1. A conceptual guide of TPSN-based sociospatial strategies.

Structuring^2 principle	Socio-spatial strategies across fields of operations
	Territory	Place	Scale	Network
Territory	Methodological territorialism^3: frontiers, borders, boundaries that contain state power	Territory-based placemaking: integrating dispersed places into a territory	Territory-based scaling: Multilevel governments	Territory-based networking: interstate system, multiarea government
Place	Place-based territorialization: Borderland, cores, empires, districts	Placecentrism: locales, milieux, cities, regions, localities	Place-based scaling: glocalization, global-local articulation	Place-based networking: local, urban, regional governance
Scale	Rescaled territorialization: Scalar division of political power	Rescaled placemaking: Local to global areal (spatial)division of labor	Scalecentrism: nested or tangled scalar hierarchies	Rescaled networking: Parallel power networks, nongovernmental international regimes
Network	Network-based Territorialization: Cross-border regions, virtual regions	Network-based place-making: global city networks	Network-based scaling: networks of differently scaled places	Networkcentrism spaces of flows, micro networks

(Source: A synthesis of Gailing et al. 2020; Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008).

TPSN framework is widely applied to explorations of environmental politics and state projects: Gailing et al. (2020) apply the framework to examine a set of experimental energy project cases in Germany, parsing out the spatial patterns and state strategies structuring different socio-spatial relations in energy transitions. Bridge et al. (2013) adopt six concepts – location, landscape, territoriality, spatial differentiation, scaling, and spatial embeddedness – to uncover the geographical implications of the low-carbon energy transistion. Seeing through the TPSN lens, Marijnen and Verweijen (2020) examine the pluralist regime of charcoal production in Virunga’s political forests, identifying polymorphic regulatory arrangements connecting a number of non-state actors and organizations staying outside central state governance. The TPSN framework captures some of the most representative aspects of the built environment, and it explicitly articulates the “structural or material aspects of contentious politics in capitalist states” (Gailing et al. 2018, 1115). Therefore, it is suitable for evaluating an urban eco-building policy such as the TCLB in this study. The TPSN schema foregrounds the spatiality of the social relations underlying an eco-building programme, uncovering how different spatial practices relate to one another and embed power relations within their respective social processes, forming polymorphic greening strategies.

Research Methods

This study adopts qualitative research methods combining semistructured interviews, historical analysis, on-site observation of buildings, and archival analyses of design documents and the media sources reporting the policy initiatives. A total of 24 interview participants, including 6 city officials from Urban Development Department, 9 real estate developers, and 9 architects, were interviewed. These individuals were selected because they were either in charge of the TCLB policy or involved in designing or constructing the TCLBs. I combine a top-down analysis using a TPSN schema and a grounded analysis based on empirical findings about TCLBs to iteratively analyse the governing strategies and their implications.

Context: History of Urban Development and State-Society Relations in Taiwan

A developmental state, a form of market economy characterized by strong state interventions and extensive regulations (Johnson 1982) describes the economic regime of Taiwan around and before the mid-1980s. As Taiwan’s economy was repositioned towards a high-tech export – oriented model after 1990, mixed influences from political democratization and economic liberalization reshaped Taiwan’s economic regime from a developmental state into a pro-growth state valuing market competition and public‒private partnership (cf. Chiu 2021). Given the electoral politics and the legacy of developmental states, the state retained its power over public affairs yet state dominance existed within a variegated social context; as such, local states, local factions⁴ and business elites after 1990 formed close-knit coalitions to pursue urban growth amidst interurban competition (Wang 1996). State policies adapted to an increasingly speculative society, structuring national and local land use regimes and property politics in accordance with development prospects through pro-growth planning strategies. Among these strategies, I will specifically introduce land readjustment, as it provides spatial context for the TCLB policy. The shifting models of the national economy contextualize the speculative housing market for property investors that began in the mid-1990s, further encouraging property-led urbanization across Taiwan.

Studies of urban development in Taiwan’s real estate boom in the 1990s have discussed how an emerging public‒private regime contributed to the speculative growth of urban land values. A growth regime comprising central government officials, municipal planners, local factions, and real estate entrepreneurs or consortia manipulated real estate investment strategies in Taiwan primarily through state-initiated and privately-initiated land readjustment projects after the lifting of martial law in 1987, when state control on urban development was eased (Chen 1995; Wang 1996). Consequently, the profits from land growth were unevenly distributed across society. Land readjustment is an urban planning tool that rezones an area into one with a different set of land uses (usually residential and commercial) along with new infrastructure. Created in the spirit of long-term planning for a pro-development rezoned area, land readjustment strategies aim to enhance land use efficiency and the quality of life for the community by spatially restructuring a defined area mixing public and private property (Huang 2013) This historical background contextualizes the rise of TCLB in the face of global environmental movements. The SRA helps explain why developers, architects and city officials opt to practice urban greening and what they gain from doing it.

The analysis yielding from the SRA suggests that the political support for modern government depends on a kind of integration mechanism that is capable of dredging, shifting and processing demands in order of priority rather than by excluding dissenting choices within the institutional framework. This theoretical perspective is highly applicable to the ecology of Taiwan’s electoral politics affecting urban policy. Following this context, a municipality-led green housing programme, such as TCLB, is a spatialized structure symbolic of “strategic selectivity” (Jessop 2016) integrating heterogeneous and yet interrelated goals of the stakeholders involved.

To detail a structure of strategic selectivity, I use the TPSN framework (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008) to bridge social and spatial analyses of a housing programme. A TPSN framework enables a multidimensional examination of sociospatial relations inherent to the TCLB through which Taichung City reconciles different yet partially compatible demands in a way that is beneficial to the public and private sectors, as further explored in the remainder of the article.

Identifying Housing-Facilitated Urban Greening Strategies

As a polymorphic schema, TPSN has been applied to a variety of studies. I especially draw upon what Jessop (2016) terms as state spatial strategies to explore the logics behind the eco-housing production in Taichung. As Jessop elucidates that state spatial strategies:

[R]efer to the historically specific practice through which state institutions and state managers (and the social forces they represent) seek to reorder territories, places, scales, networks to secure the reproduction of the state in its narrow sense, to reconfigure the sociospatial dimensions of the state in its integral sense, and to promote specific accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic visions. (139, emphasis added by author)

State spatial strategies could be understood as sociospatial strategies adopted by collaborating stakeholders to enable specific policies and practices driven by their common and respective aspirations. In the context of TCLB through which the city simultaneously creates greening and housing, I identify planning and development as two nexus connecting these sociospatial strategies informed by the TPSN schema (Table 2). I begin from discussing the two phases of a planning procedure that I understand as “place-based green territorialization”.

Table 2. Housing-facilitated urban greening strategies informed by a TPSN schema and empirical findings (source: author).

		State spatial strategies
Thematic Domains	Main paradoxes or challenges	Organizing principle	Operated fields	Operating^5 Strategies	Housing-facilitated greening strategies^6	Key stakeholders
The Planning of TCLB	Limited lands for creating green space as local development demands escalate	Place-based :taking boroughs, neighbourhoods, and/or administrative districts as basic units to apply planning decisions upon)	Territory	green territorialization	Zoning for green areas through privately-initiated land readjustment: to leverage private financing from local landowners to create centralized, public, open green space, such as parks, greenway and lawns. Selecting building lots near parks and greenways: Developers purchase lands close to public green areas to build TCLBs to produce vertical, private green space visually linked to open green space	municipality, developers
The Development of TCLB	Stakeholders have emerged but desired new housing forms to consolidate their coalitions and/or partnerships	Network-enabled : taking stakeholders’ partnerships, coalitions and social relations into account	Territory	Property deterritorialization/ reterritorialization	Exempting floor area to enable greenery	municipality, developers
			Place	Sustainable place-making	Creating liveable and symbolic greenery	municipality, architects
			Scale	Scaling up performance	Securing a housing market niche	architects, developers

The Planning of TCLBs: Place-Based Green Territorialization

As stated previously, land readjustment reorganizes lands into valuable plots with strategic locations and land uses suitable for subsequent property development. The readjustment mechanism is also able to leverage private financing for the development of larger green spaces near housing plots: the municipal planners require each landowner in a readjusted unit to contribute part of his or her land to the city to build public facilities, including parks and greenways. I detail the process as below.

• Zoning for green areas through privately-initiated land readjustment

The planning of each readjusted unit follows a general city-wide land use framework that identifies different development purposes for units located in different places. In 1976, when Taichung city enacted the comprehensive city planning review, it categorized urban lands into two zones: priority zones and later development zones. The municipality designated these latter zones primarily to control the scope and progress of urbanization. According to the review guidelines, the later development zones could be used only after over 60% of the priority zones were developed. The municipality also designated more development rights to priority zones through land use regulation codes, prescribing a low-rise and low-density development pattern for later development zones. In 1986, by which point this threshold had not yet been reached, a joint petition by land owners in the later development zones pushed the municipality to lift the development restrictions imposed on their lands. The third urban planning review in 2004 removed the restriction on later development zones, authorizing planned unit developments submitted by the organized communities. This action suggests that the city entitled property owners within an area to collaborate in organizing themselves into a committee, specifically a “privately-initiated land readjustment committee”, to conduct land readjustments for property development (Huang 2013).

The primarily locally established developers, along with city congress representatives and local factions all had ties with targeted neighbourhoods, which allows them to lobby local landowners within specific places to sell their lands to developers who in turn grouped and reorganized acquired lands into privately-initiated readjusted units. Capitalizing on property interests generated from large land readjustment projects, real estate developers, property owners, local factions, and elected officials collaborated on mobilizing residential development reshaping underdeveloped areas (Chen 1995; Wang 1996). By 2010, large parcels of land in several readjusted units in Taichung city had provided new development opportunities (Huang 2013). These privately-initiated readjusted committees prioritized zoning for open space able to form green networks. For example, one of the units with three parks and greenways configuring a clearly defined green network has become a noted district where a number of TCLBs were built (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A privately-initiated readjusted unit with a planned green network (in the darkest shades) in Taichung City. (Source: Jin Jan Cultural Enterprise Co. Ltd. Adapted by author with permission)

• Selecting building lots near parks and greenways

To seize the opportunity of low-rise, low-density development, developers preferred producing housing projects with abundant greenery and ecological amenities often near parks and along greenways to visually extends TCLBs’ greenery to optimize the greening effect. As one developer said,

We bought four large parcels of land across the park around twelve to eleven years ago. Then, we characterized the housing we hoped to develop as “green and exquisite”. Therefore, we had already positioned the product when we bought the land. Yet, we only knew we would accommodate a large amount of greening, so we had ordered trees for two billion TW dollars back then. (interview, a developer, D1)

Based on the TPSN schema, local networks formed among municipal officials, developers, land owners, and local politicians influence by whom a privately-initiated land readjustment was formed and co-governed. More importantly, the networks were organized around several neighbourhoods and areas in close proximity by people with knowledge of local customs, history and social capital. Thus, place is an organizing principle that informed how TCLBs were embedded in the urban planning mechanism.⁷ As the quote above suggests, developers strategically sought land parcels near plots designated as parks or greenways so that they could capitalize on the ecological amenities to increase property values and to link these green spaces to their property and vice versa. The site selection logic is in line with the TPSN framework’s definition of place, as it takes proximity, spatial embeddedness, areal differentiation into account by geographically relating a site or a housing project to selected places (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008).

Led by place as an organizing principle, the municipality and readjustment committees create and expand green space through zoning for green areas in the land readjustment procedure and by selecting building lots near parks and greenways. Informed by the framework, territorialization theorizes the corresponding practices, as it explains how the stakeholders worked together to define an area as a readjustment unit with boundaries and spatial divisions. I term this process as “place-based green territorialization” and use it to uncover the sociospatial relations inherent to given urban places. I reveal how the neighbourhoods (within readjusted units) where TCLBs appeared and the sites of TCLBs were produced. This conceptualization allows me to embed TCLBs in a fabric of urban greenery while seeing how urban places compatible with TCLBs were planned. Next, I proceed to discuss the making of the TCLB programme itself.

The Development of TCLBs: Network-Enabled Operations Across Different Fields

Taking the TPSN framework to analyse how the city government, developers, and architects constructed an eco-architectural regime for a quasi-green housing programme, I prioritize networks as the organizing principle, as they emphasize the “interconnectivity, interdependence and transversal or ‘rhizomatic’ differentiation within social relations” (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008, 393), which is particularly useful in analysing the intersectoral relations among the three main stakeholders of the TCLB programme. In addition to the historically formed affiliations among growth coalition members indicated previously, below, I summarize some of their interrelations through a brief history of the TCLB programme to justify networks as an organizing principle for TCLB development.

• The formation of a tripartite network

Design of multiunit housing complexes would require architects to shape built forms adaptive to local markets or living norms and to think beyond existing building codes.⁸ This situation is salient in Taichung, where local architects have always found existing building codes too dated and inflexible to support housing forms sensitive to socioeconomic changes, such as population ageing, a declining birth rate, and rising environmental awareness, which lead to emerging market demands. Several well-connected senior architects and developers in Taichung City have advocated for a special housing prototype accommodating vertical greening in residential buildings, which they see as a growing trend. In 2014, The Greater Taichung Architects Association (GTAA) initiated efforts in lobbying with the municipal government to legislate for and to incentivize an eco-housing programme compatible with vertical greening in high-rise housing. Leading members of GTAA drafted a preliminary TCLB programme to the mayor, suggesting the parts and components in and on the buildings that may make the buildings look greener and more unique.

Meanwhile, a newly passed urban policy, “Autonomous Regulations of Low-Carbon Urban Development in Taichung City”, entitled local states to enact city-level green building codes or climate-relief measures not yet subsumed under national codes (Chen 2020). For instance, Kaohsiung city, another major city in Taiwan, enacted its green housing programme in 2014 and gained modest acclaim. The GTAA leveraged the achievement in Kaohsiung City to collaborate with the municipality to pass the ordinance and amend the Taichung building regulations accordingly. Combining the municipality’s vision of a “liveable city” and architects’ desires to develop locally distinct green housing, the Urban Development Department named the programme “Taichung City Liveable Buildings”. Seeing through the lens of state spatial strategies (Jessop 2016), TCLB is positioned to embody the municipality’s vision and developers’ business strategies, carrying historical contingency in its dual responses to demographic and climate changes in Taichung.

The Urban Development Department of Taichung City government collaborated with the GTAA to explore ways to green the designs of housing complexes. Given that developers emphasize land use efficiency, their partnered architects prioritize property interests in their allocation of green areas. Architects found that they could expand the greening effect on the facades and increase the visibility of the buildings if they were entitled to expand balconies and terraces for growing more plants. In so doing, GTAA drafted a modification of the existing building codes, which had limited semi-outdoor areas of the housing complexes, obtaining approval from the municipality. In 2015, GTAA officially invited the Taichung Real Estate Development Association to continue detailing building code amendments, and both parties visited Singapore soon after for a field investigation to learn how Singapore thrives as a garden city (Han 2017) even as it is also a dense city filled with high-rises.

For the next 2 years,⁹ the aforementioned parties deliberated intensively with the central and local governments regarding the restrictions on and incentives for the added green areas and whether such facilities should be exempted from floor area quotas. After several amendments, the main green elements were confirmed to be landscaped balconies, exterior (living) shades and high terraces (Figure 2) (Chen 2020; Yu 2019).¹⁰ In 2018, an architect-turned-new director of the Urban Development Department provided more political support for GTAA in finalizing a TCLB prototype, officially launching the programme in March 2019.

Figure 2. A TCLB with landscaped balconies and exterior shades. (Source: Author)

The Urban Development Department of Taichung city acknowledges that the real challenge of sustaining both the regime and the programme comes from the TCLBs’ dual performances in terms of the market and the greening effect. To sustain TCLB development, then, is to maintain a cohesive network among stakeholders. Networks therefore serve as an organizing principle to parse value-led strategies of developing TCLBs across different operated fields. I divide the stakeholders into three pairs of relations to clarify various levels of consensus building, and each pair corresponds to a network-based operating strategy leading to a housing-facilitated greening strategy. I discuss each of these strategies below.

• Property deterritorialization/reterritorialization (municipality – developer network): Exempting floor areas to enable greening

Considering that the municipality leverages housing development to produce green space, territorialization explains how developers carve out specific territory within each apartment that is able to generate greenery. To achieve the equilibrium of power relations between the municipality and developers, a territory produced in this process needs to create mutual interests by simultaneously benefiting the developers. In sociospatial theory, the concept of territory originated in the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1972). They suggest that social relations are altered and stabilized through deterritorialization and reterritorialization occurring simultaneously, and they characterize capitalism as “the movement of social production that goes to the very extremes of its deterritorialization” (142). Territorialization implies a practice involving the bordering, bounding and enclosing of a claimed property (Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008), while deterritorialization means giving up on a property or excluding a parcel of property. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s “deterritorialize to reterritorialize” logic in capitalist production, I analyse the city’s exemption of the floor areas of landscaped balconies from the total floor area quotas within the building code as a strategy of deterritorialization to expand developers’ profit margins.

Developers support the exemption given its economic and technical feasibility. As one of the developers said, “if you want to break through the price cap given the current market, you must have additional space to visibly green the building” (interview, a developer, D2).¹¹ The use of the “exempted floor area” then became a strategy within an already bounded territory affording both extra green spaces and property value to simultaneously meet the expectations of the municipality and developers.

The exemption of the floor area of landscaped balconies adds indoor floor area to each apartment or allows architects to create additional apartments in a single project if the standard apartment size remains the same. By national land administration codes, developers cannot trade on such enlarged balconies and terraces by including them in property administration documents either as individual or common areas to calculate property prices. Nevertheless, the developers whom I interviewed suggested that they have adapted to this restriction by raising the total housing price. Given that a TCLB tends to have larger apartments or more housing units, developers generally profit from investing in TCLB development since it has appeal to a targeted clientele (which will be explored below).

From the perspective of home buyers, compared to other housing in building lots zoned for the same land uses and providing the same floor ratio, customers of TCLBs are able to buy larger apartments. The semi-outdoor facilities on these buildings are typically priced at a lower rate; thus, when these facilities are larger, it gives the home buyers an impression of paying less for larger apartments, especially for customers who do not mind or who even favour having large balconies. By investing in a larger property, customers tend to benefit from an increase in the mortgage ratio. For developers and customers, the exempted floor area was a win‒win strategy.

For the municipality, the exempted floor area was an incentive for developers to “go green” with the apartments designed; it indirectly allowed the municipality to transfer the work and responsibility of installing greenery from itself to developers and property owners. As a city official¹² says,

In contrast with a city-wide public green space system integrating parks, lawns, and greenways in urban planning, the idea of a landscaped balcony is one way to bring greenery into the personal living environment inside an apartment building. It gives you a feeling of living in a single-family house with a front yard even though you cannot afford to live in one. (Interview, a city official, C1)

The municipality incentivizes developers while requiring rebates from them as a restraint or facilitator. To monitor developers’ maintenance of the vegetation on the balconies from the exempted floor area, the municipality required TCLB developers to submit deposits in the form of rebates to the Urban Development Department once building permits were obtained for a new project. The department gradually returns the rebates to developers following scheduled check-ups for plants over three years. In doing so, the exempted floor area economically benefits both developers and the municipality and generates the desired greenery.

• Sustainable placemaking (municipality – architect network): Creating liveable and symbolic greenery

Since most people assume shrinkage in green space over property development, the discursive construction of greenery needs to be mobilized to justify and facilitate TCLB development. Architects and municipal planners have collaborated on TCLBs from scratch and are concerned with producing attractive buildings and an attractive city, respectively. Both parties then become the key interlocutors of TCLB-related spatial discourse. Instead of seeing a spatial subject as a bounded plot or homogenous entity, the idea of a place acknowledges inner inconsistency and areal variation in how a spatial entity is embedded in larger contexts, enabling a set of attributes characterizing the spatial quality (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008). Creating a place physically and discursively is an act of place-making; it allows social relations, identity, and affect to emerge in or around particular settings so that they become spatialized. As Jessop (2016) defines placemaking as a process by claiming “it enframes social relations within spaces of everyday, more or less proximate interaction” (138), it is reasonable to link users’ on-site experience of TCLB to placemaking.

At the physical level, architects see gardens or courtyards as valuable places for modern housing to return to for quality of life since such settings are niches to be infused with affect, social interaction and natural ambiance. The common areas in a modern high-rise housing complex often appear confined given its compact layout and limited exposure to the outside, attracting limited use. Because the building codes permit only a small percentage of balconies and terraces in the total floor area, more (semi-)outdoor space in the housing complex also becomes a luxury. In commercial terms, developers were reluctant to expand any balconies or terraces, as they would have to build smaller or fewer apartments to deliver them since the total floor area would remain the same. Architects in the GTAA sought to overcome the aforementioned constraints to produce housing forms that would accommodate usable and agreeable balconies and terraces as their place-making efforts. As a senior member said,

“People miss the courtyards in the traditional villages where they can dry clothes or farm produce, and children can play games; people barbecue and chill out with neighbours there in the evening. However, there is no such ‘living space’ in the city because these yards count as floor area given the current building codes shaping real estate market standards. Therefore, there is this idea of creating a green high terrace in the TCLB with a three-floor height and exempting its area from the building’s total floor area. It resembles an old-time courtyard surrounded by dwelling units. Little by little, it may help to form community relations (similar to those in the past) in the sky as we don’t have it in a modern city now”. (Interview, an architect, A1)

The municipality supported the architects’ proposal because it has always desired to enhance more grey buildings with “green looks”, which the architects can now easily cater to by designing high terraces. As a city official in the Urban Development Department suggests,

There are so many buildings with barren rooftops and balconies in the city even though some have plant pots on them. We already created green roof mandates that require one-third of the rooftop areas to be green roofs, but maximizing the greening effect by taking the full urban landscape into consideration would help to expand the vertical greening practice. (Interview, a city official, C2)

A physical placemaking project is often accompanied by placemaking activities, including narratives, events, or exhibitions for a discursive construction of place (Wyckoff 2014). In 2022, Taichung city mobilized a set of press releases on all news media reviewing the accomplishments of the TCLB programme and quoting the following statement made by the director of the Urban Development Department:

TCLBs bring greening into each household’s balcony, transforming a building into a forest. All of the programme’s greening facilities have increased the number of trees in the city to 3443; this number of trees is about 2 times the total planted in Taichung Wenxin Forest Park and 162 times those planted in a neighbourhood park. TCLBs have accomplished a “one project for one park” mission. (Chang 2022)

At the same time that the press release was issued, the municipality held a “TCLB triennial exhibition” to showcase to the public all the built and ongoing projects. The texts “garden”, “forest”, and “park” dominated the publicity news and display boards to refer to greening deployed in and around a TCLB. In the exhibition, the Urban Development Department decorated each thematic show room as a garden-like area with potted plants, flowers, and outdoor couches to create situated watching experiences echoing the discursive placemaking. The director of the GTAA, on behalf of the real estate industry and the community of architects involved, spoke at the opening ceremony, claiming that the policy has made Taichung “a city filled with gardens”.

When discursively constructing TCLBs and their greening performance, either the public or private stakeholders constantly use a garden and/or a forest as an index because they are vivid metaphors for laypeople to comprehend the performance and values of the policy. Beyond the metaphorical utility, these terms have become icons of sustainable cities owing to the urban greening achievements in other countries. By appropriating such terms as “vertical forests” or “garden city” commonly used to refer to projects in Milan and Singapore, the municipality conducts strategic placemaking (Wyckoff 2014) to brand Taichung not only as a green city but also as a “world-class” city. While the municipality cannot guarantee clear blue skies given the high-octane economy in Taichung and in Taiwan overall, it desires a collection of gradually increasing numbers of trees in high-rise housing projects as a new, legible “Taichung image” to approximate the pursuit of a low-carbon city.

I use “sustainable placemaking” to synthesize the municipality’s aspiration to green the city and architects’ enthusiasm in making liveable terraces and balconies. To accomplish the municipality’s task of shaping a pro-environment urban image while reducing its maintenance costs, architects need to design buildings in a way that affords abundant greenery included on landscaped balconies (within apartments) and high terraces (in common areas). The programme guidelines also encourage architects to adopt exterior living shades to shape forest-like facades, furthering the placemaking effects vertically. The sustainable placemaking strategy fulfils both parties’ ideals with regard to shaping good places, visually and socially, motivating them to continue design innovation. Next, I proceed to discuss the third pair of relations revealing another set of sociospatial strategies.

• Scaling up performance (developer – architect network): Securing a market niche

The real estate market central to the implementation of the TCLB foregrounds a developer – architect partnership aspiring to define an alternative, if not new, market for green housing in Taichung. Each new TCLB provides an entry to a green housing market as long as a developer – architect network is functioning properly. To achieve TCLB success, developers must profit from investing in a TCLB. The 2008 global financial crisis slowed the steady growth of the real estate economy in the 2000s. Since 2010, the Taiwan Central government has enforced a luxury tax on the real estate market to discourage housing speculation, which formed another deterrent to developers aside from the aforementioned recession. To cope with the waning housing market, real estate industry members sought new ways to appeal to investors.

When the real estate economy stumbles, developers need to rediscover a niche for themselves in a market already overstocked with similar housing projects. The incorporation of vertical greening into a housing format, as adopted in the TCLB, aims to capitalize on distinction to attract an emerging line of home buyers, often newly rich in their 30s or 40s, longing for a green and sustainable living. Developers also want to sell each new building at a higher rate than they did previously, considering the effects of a shrinking housing market over recent years. Developers collaborate with architects to produce new housing formats capable of achieving these set goals. As one said:

Because developers want to boost housing prices, they must make buildings as green as possible. In other words, to push the price to a higher level, they must apply the concepts of liveable buildings to new designs because this makes the buildings attractive. (Interview, an architect, A2)

Vertical greening serves the dual purposes of attracting the middle class and branding given its visual aesthetics and distinctiveness, enabling the rise of a market niche. Even though architects seem to appropriate greenery to sell nature to the public, they associated the new green additions with customers’ acceptance of the placemaking of TCLB:

I didn’t know how well the market would take it when TCLBs were sold at the beginning, but the results surprised me. With a large balcony, it sold well. Everyone wants this. S/he (the customer) would say that s/he needed good quality of life from buying a new home and didn’t want a big house with many rooms. Maybe these days people have fewer children in the family, so they want a large balcony, so they can eat, drink, enjoy the sunset, or do some activities outdoors. Developers think it is worth making landscaped balconies because these outdoor areas cost less than indoor areas. (Interview, an architect, A3)

This attempt to create a market niche in housing represents a scaling strategy because the partnership scales up the effect of urban greening by exercising market forces. The reason a market niche exists here is that TCLBs are positioned between luxurious condos and regular housing to avoid competition. To that end, TCLBs need to appear innovative and tasteful while using generally modest building materials to appeal to their target clientele. Developers in Taichung have pursued vertical greening more actively than those in other cities in recent years, and city-led architectural wards and media publicity have favoured eco-housing projects. These facts warrant TCLB stakeholders’ emphasis on a market niche centred on green housing.

• Constructing the regime for the TCLB initiative

The municipality aims to construct an eco-housing regime integrating the aforementioned strategies so that all parties can realize their interests by participating in the programme. A residential building affording exterior or outdoor greening visible from the ground can suffice if green installations take place on exempted floor area. The municipality then detailed a list of architectural guidelines based on this principle to complete a TCLB programme. The TCLB programme becomes one of the general solutions integrating the institutional, legal, social and economic dimensions of a holistic and relational regime that Jessop (2016) terms as “strategic selectivity”, unifying the diverse demands and balancing competing forces in housing-facilitated greening policies. A new housing prototype thus emerged as the state seeks to produce urban green space while promoting housing development by opting to consider the benefits and interests of multiple stakeholders against those of the capitalists. The regime shows the strategically relational nature of practices of state power, which resolves potential conflicts by paving an alternative pathway towards economic growth and sustainability

Conclusion

Departing from the theoretical lens of the SRA, this article explores how the three major stakeholders of TCLBs negotiated and reformulated building regulations and an architectural programme to respond to rising environmental awareness among the public, the municipality’s own desire to balance urban development and greening performance, and the profit-driven goals of the real estate industry. Informed more specifically by the TPSN framework, the analysis reveals nuances in multidimensional strategies manoeuvred by stakeholders to reconcile conflicts and used by the state to build consensus among multiple pursuits and diverse interests beyond those of the major capitalist players. One can then see that pro-growth coalitions are resilient when they modify their discourse to negotiate new regulatory and political contexts, specifically when pursuing sustainability fixes (cf. Jocoy 2018). In this way, a new mode of housing has emerged in the real estate market that aims to satisfy developers’ profit-led motives while absorbing some environmental dissension by building “green”. To leverage the real estate market to shape a green city image and vice versa, municipal planners and developers embed the TCLBs within wider place-based operations in terms of land readjustment and building lot selection.

The rationale for adopting a TPSN framework to make sense of an eco-housing programme is not only to explain why a municipal government and the real estate sector would collaborate to develop eco-housing complexes but also to parse the spatiality of social relations constructing the political power that the municipal government depends on to formulate and operationalize key strategies at different administrative levels to green the city. The paradox inherent to a housing-facilitated greening policy justifies the need to analyse how stakeholders leverage, compromise and negotiate with one another’s power and capability in terms of developing TCLBs. Here, the interactions occur polymorphically, specifically through land planning and property development as two sociospatial nexuses of governance centred on the ideas of place and network, respectively. The nexus of development correlates with three types of operating strategies, showing how eco-housing is developed through property deterritorialization/reterritorialization, sustainable placemaking, and scaling up performance under network-enabled political and economic conditions. This multidimensional interrogation has responded to the shortcomings identified in the introduction of this article: instead of engaging with an analytic dichotomy separating the green from the built environment, this article reveals the processes and mechanism of the real estate market in negotiating green spaces. The TPSN-inspired state spatial strategies and their operating approaches thus may inform alternative but equally helpful policy making appropriate for different configurations of state-society networks elsewhere to pursue housing development and urban greening simultaneously.

We need a polymorphic analysis of state-society relations structured around market-based, property-led urban greening today. Thinking beyond any scalar or place-specific restructuring such as a spatial fix, spatiotemporal fix (Harvey 1982), or sustainability fix (While, Jonas and Gibbs 2004), using a polymorphic analysis can destabilize the development-for-growth logic of capitalism while parsing other goals, aspirations and desires in a state project, such as the pursuit of green living and liveability embedded in TCLBs (cf. Li and Chiu 2020). To do so, one needs individually defined but mutually constituted analytic units to identify key actions, practices and strategies for comprising on operational protocols and regimes. Distinguishing these sociospatial dimensions, categories, and fields of operations also allows us to identify where stakeholders have succeeded or have fallen short in the landscape of greening politics. For instance, the coalitions of networks did not actively engage environmentalists, homeowners and residents in configuring the TCLB housing formats. Although officials and architects adopted eco-friendly thinking when they created the liveable building prototype, their belief in leveraging the real estate market to create green spaces limited the potential contribution of inputs from society at large (cf. Laage-Thomsen and Blok 2020; Sanesi and Chiarello 2006). Embedding greening interventions in housing formats, albeit as a strategic and pragmatic strategy, produces more private green space than public green space. To address this issue, I recommend remedial measures that enable an increase in public access to high terraces or selected communal areas within each TCLB property. Nevertheless, the TPSN framework or its extended version (Bridge et al. 2013) downplays nonhuman agency in greening interventions and eco-building design. For example, the creation of the biodiversity of plants and insects as a key feature of green buildings and sustainable cities would require alternative investigations centred on multispecies perspectives beyond anthropocentric views focused primarily on the visual impact of greenery. Future eco-housing research can benefit from even more holistic frameworks incorporating conceptual vectors that capture diffused forms of subjectivity inherent to human – environment (or human – ecology) relations.

Acknowledgement

I thank all the research participants for their inputs and the following research assistants for their help: Zen-Ren Chen assisted in several interviews; Jun-Wei Guo helped with parts of the literature search; Yu-Wei Li provided graphic assistance for Figure 1. I am grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan [MOST 108-2410-H-305-056-MY2 and NSTC 112-2410-H-002-168] and a National Taiwan University New Faculty Grant [111L7410].

Notes

1. For example, Stefano Boeri’s Vertical Forest in Milan and Edouard François’s Flower Tower in Paris deploy vegetation around building facades high above the ground to create lushly green exteriors. To a lesser extent, intensive greening is also seen in public housing. For example, OFF & Duncan Lewis SCAPE Architecture designed a green affordable housing block in Anglet, France.

2. A structuring principle refers to a causal process, a set of logics or a mechanism that influences or directs operations or sociospatial relations. The operations are therefore based on or enabled by this principle. I adapt this term with “an organizing principle” in the later analysis.

3. The four grey columns represent unidimensional analyses. For example, a frontier as a territory is a product of bordering strategies (Jessop 2016). Considering that TPSN theory speaks against unidimensional approach, I add grey shades to the four unidimensional combinations as they apply more to producing primitive spatial forms than generating sociospatial strategies.

4. The local factions here refer to informal circles of local elites holding critical influence on local politics in terms of securing votes from the electorate and selecting electoral candidates given these individuals’ connection to the local communities. In Taiwan, different political parties have sought patronage to co-opt local factions in elections or for regime consolidation (Wang 1996; cf. Wu 2003).

5. I identify these operating strategies combining a top-down approach using a TPSN schema and a grounded analysis based on empirical findings. The terms, including green, property, sustainable, and performance are inductive codes derived from interviews and archival contents.

6. This column shows how the state spatial strategies are applied to the realm of housing-facilitated urban greening, which are detailed in this article under the sub-headings same as the phrases in italics in this column.

7. One can indeed interpret the same relations by arranging the four analytic units in the TPSN schema differently. What I decide to focus depends on an assessment regarding what option may yield more insights in terms of an operating strategy. For example, the network-enabled territorialization would also explain a land readjustment case, but network does not capture the imbalanced power relations sufficiently, since developers dominate the readjustment procedure more easily than other stakeholders given the historically contingent place-specific politics and property interest of urban development in Taichung (Huang 2013; Wang 1996). In the social theory, the network concept is unique in its symmetric depiction of interconnections and relational processes, mainly informed by the Actor-Network-Theory (Latour, 1987) ontology. Network would therefore signify mutually supportive interrelations among stakeholders in the development of TCLBs.

8. I synthesize the TCLB formation processes detailed hereinafter mainly based on my interviews with multiple informants in this study, in addition to archival sources.

9. During approximately the same period, Italian architect Stefano Boeri designed Milan’s “Vertical Forest”, which inspired the city officials and GTAA with its green spectacle of hundreds of trees and shrubs in a residential tower.

10. Exterior living shades are vertical, vegetation-attached sunshades. A high terrace has a three-floor height and is topped by a higher floor.

11. Each cited interviewee is represented by a code with an initial and a number: A for an architect, C for a city official, D for a housing developer.

12. All city officials interviewed are from the Urban Development Department of Taichung City government, as it is the governing institution of the TCLB programme.