Kaya Chen

Partnership on Urban Regeneration - case study in Taipei, Taiwan

Urban regeneration is a crucial issue which every developed cities have to face. It is a kind of activity which seeks to achieve a lasting improvement in the economic, physical, social and environmental conditions of an area. Urban regeneration becomes increasingly important in Taiwan recently but there are more problems than expected when it is actually implemented. According to the regulations review, we can see that the policies try to adopt partnership approach to resolve the economic burden and inhabitants' protests in urban regeneration. Especially after the Regulation for Urban Renewal in Taipei was published in 1993, many policies were purposed to attract private investments in the old developed areas. However, the result of those policies was not effective because there are still many protests and arguments from inhabitants, lay public and experts. Furthermore, from my previous research experience, I find that the government seems still the be one who makes the decision. I really want to explore either those problems are arise from the policies itself or incomplete practice. Hausner (1993) noted that an individual scheme of urban regeneration should reflect the wider circumstances and requirements of the city or region in which it is located. Thus, the different area should have different regeneration play to suit its specific condition. As well as partnership, relationship of actors is the key factor of partnership. (Young, 2000) Therefore, the opinions and attitudes of different key actors should be considered carefully. Unfortunately, most of the relevant researches about Taiwan's urban regeneration ignore to discover the intrinsic problems in it.

According to the conditions above, it is clear that the actually problems of partnership in Taipei's urban regeneration need to be explored first if the partnership wants to be improved. Thus, there are three main aims of this research:

1. To understand the purpose of government policies.
2. To find out the effect of those policies.
3. To analyze the problems of partnership on urban regeneration and then try to propose suggestions for how to build a suitable partnership model in Taipei's urban regeneration.

In order to achieve those aims, there are two areas that will be chosen for case studies and some appropriate methods that will be utilized. First of all, the methods of documents analysis and interviews will be used to understand the purpose of policies. Then, the key actor's viewpoints will reveal by interviews as well. Finally, all the data from documents analysis and interviews will be used to discover what the problem of partnership actually is in Taipei. If those aims can be achieved in this research, the result not only can provide useful suggestions to the government, but also can build an effective partnership model in Taipei.

email : trp02hc@sheffield.ac.uk