Sustainable Cities in Asia

Federico Caprotti,Li Yu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317284888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With Asia's cities undergoing unprecedented growth in the 21st century, lauded the 'urban century' by many, Sustainable Cities in Asia provides a timely examination of the challenges facing cities across the continent including some of the projects, approaches and solutions that are currently being tested.

This book uses numerous case studies, analysing topical issues ranging from city cycling in India, to green spaces in China, to the use of community-led energy generation projects in post-Fukushima Japan. Containing contributions from an international team of scholars, it also takes a multi-disciplinary approach and draws on examples from a wide range of countries, including China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Ultimately, by providing a comprehensive discussion of the broader debates around the shape of sustainable urbanism, it demonstrates that Asia is one of the most active regions in terms of the development of sustainable city strategies.

Tackling the contemporary issues of key importance for sustainability, such as property markets, migration and transport, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Urban Geography, Sustainability, Environmental Studies and Asian studies.

Section III

Shaping the sustainable city in Asia

14

Sustainable community development in Taipei, Taiwan

Yung-Jaan Lee

Introduction

Closely examining how humans and the environment are related has often led to promotion of sustainable development. In particular, an increasing number of individuals realize that sustainability should be a way of life (Dienhart and Ludescher 2010; Spangenberg 2011; Heal 2012), a key policy paradigm (European Commission 2010), an overarching ethic (Plummer 2006) and even a fresh global perspective (Eckersley 2006). Without this outlook, sustainability remains a plan, strategy, slogan or buzzword (Caprotti et al. 2015). Conversely, current urban design and management methods have yielded unsustainable development practices (Burch 2010). Nevertheless, the re-organization of society and public spaces to fully implement ecological protection practices accelerates continuously and takes new directions (While et al. 2010).

According to the United Nations, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas (UN DESA 2012). According to an earlier UN report (United Nations 2014), the heavy concentration of resource use in urban areas has exacerbated the over-exploitation of natural resources. Despite occupying only 2% of the earth’s surface, cities consume 75% of global energy and produce 80% of all greenhouse gases. In the upcoming decades, the major driver of damage and losses that are caused by associated disasters will be the growth of populations and assets in harm’s way, especially in urban areas (IPCC 2014; Revi and Satterthwaite 2014; ICLEI 2015). Therefore, numerous planners have dedicated themselves to incorporating ecological protection and sustainable development into planning. These approaches have given birth to innovative concepts, including the eco-state, eco-city and eco-village (Caprotti 2015).

Under this circumstance, a sustainable community can transform the way in which individuals view the relationship between everyday living and the environment, leading to more environmental friendly interactions (Silberstein 2010). However, exactly what the term ‘sustainable communities’ means and their implementation remain unclear (Black 2004; Kearns and Turok 2004; Grimm 2011). Despite its importance, this interaction between individuals and nature is often neglected, distorted or commercialized during industrialization and urbanization. Consequently, in addition to constrained living spaces for urban dwellers, the delicate balance between human lives and their surrounding environment may be disrupted. Despite these challenges, practitioners, policy makers and academics increasingly prioritize sustainable development practices in communities (Middlemiss and Parrish 2010; Seyfang 2010; Grimm 2011).

A community consists of two major components: physical and social infrastructure (Grimm 2011). The former has clear spatial boundaries, i.e. residents of a particular area share a similar identity, along with social, psychological and cultural links. The latter focuses on the ‘network and local social system’ (Smith 2001) or ‘elements that connect people to one another’ (Grimm 2011). Nevertheless, communities in a dynamic and open city establish different associations based on various activities or issues, of which, geographical association is not the only one (Dienhart and Ludescher 2010). Restated, communities are dynamic systems, and their formation is determined by its associations.

In addition to environmental perspective, public policy increasingly prioritizes the ability of communities to instigate social and economic change (Eversole 2011; Rahman 2015). Taipei City has thus implemented sustainable community planning programs since 2003. The Community Empowerment Network, Taipei (CENT) serves as an interactive platform for citizens, community organizations and governmental authorities. Community selection was based on projects proposed by communities and outcomes from an environmental education workshop. Finally, seven communities were chosen as demonstration projects for sustainable community planning. This study examines the implementation mechanisms and strategic planning related to sustainable community development in Taipei. As one of Taiwan’s 100 Excellent Communities, Jiantan Community (which is Taipei’s Environmental Education Community) is selected as a case study to evaluate sustainability-related activities.

Environmental issues and vulnerability differ by location (Aretano et al. 2015), for example, inland flooding has been identified as dominant environmental issues leading to disasters in Asia (Rosenzweig et al. 2015). Experience emerging from cities such as Taipei, which are innovators in dealing with environmental change, suggests that in the absence of national policy, established best practice alone is not sufficient to bring about transformative changes at the city level that is necessary to mainstream environmental sustainability policies (Carmin et al. 2012). Local champions and non-governmental organizations play an important role in imitating action by proposing for change and influencing local governments (Kernaghan and da Silva 2014). The CENT experience in Taipei could serve as an example of such efforts.

Establishing sustainable communities

Urban community: connectedness of relationships

Cities have highly dynamic, open and complex relationships (Kelbaugh and McCullough 2008; Revi and Satterthwaite 2014). Urban dwellers establish different relationships among different areas of a city with different activities. In a distant and anonymous city, most relationships between residents and city styles are often neglected because they are obscure or even assumed to be unrelated to certain communities. However, if a community is defined as a gathering of residents who possess a sense of belonging (Crow and Allan 1994) and share social, psychological and cultural relationships, then a community is established based on the relationships between a place (or locality) and a group of individuals that carry out diverse activities.

In other words, community is a dynamic system and its establishment depends on the connectedness of relationships, or as Putnam (2000) refers to it as ‘social capital’. This relational concept (Grimm 2011) leads to the question of boundary (Grimm 2011), i.e. what denotes the beginning and end of a community (Smith 2001)? Owing to the transformative nature of socio-economic patterns and lifestyles, community consciousness can surpass geographical boundaries (Dienhart and Ludescher 2010). Lee and Newby (1983) posit that the close proximity of urban residents living near each other does not necessarily imply that they have much in common with each other. Neighbors may have little interaction and interconnectivity with each other. A community is, more importantly, characterized by the relationships between individuals and the social networks to which they belong (Smith 2001).

Community action is highly motivated by a sense of place and a pride of ownership – symbolic or actual (Grimm 2011). Correspondingly, the interactions between individuals and their physical environment form various community relationships (Dienhart and Ludescher 2010). Actually, interaction facilitates individuals to construct communities, commit themselves to each other and nurture a social fabric (Archer et al. 2014). Therefore, urban communities do not necessarily overlap with the geographical boundary of neighborhoods; it is, at most, a partial intersection of multiple relationships.

Context: sustainable communities

Most countries have sustainable development strategies, yet differ in priorities and conceptual approaches (Spangenberg 2011). While sustainable development was initially characterized by abstract economic and social systems, or with the global socio-economic system, concrete spatial issues were seldom addressed. More recent research has incorporated spatial concepts to define sustainable variables (Kennedy et al. 2012; Pacetti et al. 2012; Arup et al. 2014), sparking a discussion on the role of urban sustainability.

For example, Finco and Nijkamp (2001) discussed how to achieve urban sustainability and described related policies. They posited that urban sustainability should comprise physical (natural and built), social and economical elements that accurately reflect environmental justice (inter-and intra-generational), long-term allocation efficiency and distribution efficiency. Moreover, Ahern (2007) examined the feasibility of using urban green infrastructure as an effective means of spatially organizing urban environments to support a suite of ecological and cultural functions.

Schulz et al. (2013) examined the correlations between multiple aspects of urban neighborhood environments and physical activity to more thoroughly elucidate their independent and joint effects, while focusing on the extent to which the condition of the built environment and indicators of the social environment alter correlations between structural characteristics and physical activity.

In addition to enabling urban communities to generate a new mentality regarding development, sustainable development provides urban communities with a concrete development direction (Silberstein 2010). Sustainable communities maintain and increase the interdependence of economy, society and environment. This description, which integrates ecological, economic and social dimensions, can be viewed as an ideal towards which a community might strive (Black 2004). Sustainable communities surpass environmental measures, addressing a full range of community needs, e.g. housing, health care, education and public safety (Grimm 2011).

However, sustainable communities in an urban context may have difficulty in encompassing all aspects of sustainability, especially the economic dimension. A built environment is influenced not only by economic patterns, but also by social and political trends that affect investments in a local infrastructure (Schulz et al. 2013). However, economic development tends to be a policy issue for an area larger than the community itself (i.e. a city, metropolitan area or country), explaining why sustainable community development often does not focus on broader economic development and political issues and challenges. Therefore, this study will focus on environmental integrity and social equity dimensions for sustainable community development in Taipei City.

Mechanisms for sustainable community development in Taipei

Establishment of a community empowerment network

As an empowerment process, community planning focused on individuals in a specific place can benefit communities of any scale, from neighborhoods to districts to towns/cities to regions (Grimm 2011). Therefore, since 1996, the Taipei City Government has promulgated environmental reform programs to improve communities via spatial strategies as the primary focus of community building programs in order to enhance the quality of living and physical environment. Since then, the Taipei City Government has enacted community planning and development programs, including a community planner system and educational programs for young community planners. The Government further strived to achieve community empowerment by establishing the Community Empowerment Network, Taipei (CENT) in 2003.

CENT functions as a platform to facilitate communication between citizens, community organizations and governmental authorities. In addition to assisting citizens in holding community planning and environmental reform activities, CENT also serves as an important venue for sustainable community development and empowerment in Taipei. Following the establishment of four branch offices in 2011, CENT has coordinated with these branch offices in holding diverse activities such as helping communities to achieve sustainability goals.

Sustainable community development program

Individuals must be involved proactively in solving problems rather than only opposing governmental policies. Such involvement requires self-sustaining, bottom-up participation (Grimm 2011). Community participation in policy formulation and/or implementation has received growing interest worldwide (Fawcett et al. 2010; Bailey and Pill 2011; Eversole 2011; Grimm 2011). Although participatory communities may be communities of interest and/or communities of place, the focus is typically on place-based communities, based on their local knowledge and related policy insights (Grimm 2011).

Given the importance of community participation and cross-sector collaboration in sustainable community development, the Taipei City Government actively encouraged community residents to become involved in devising sustainable community practices. The community building strategy focused on proposals actively drafted by communities, while the demonstrative sustainable community selection mechanism was adopted as the operational procedure for sustainable community development.

Sustainable community selection in Taipei was conducted by CENT. Various organizations and agencies, including community planners, neighborhood leaders and other NGOs, also disseminated sustainable community selection information and instructions to communities in Taipei. CENT solicited proposals from the communities. Following several working meetings and inspections of the proposals, the reviewing committee assessed and ranked the candidates for devising sustainable community practices. CENT continued to provide counseling services to those communities not selected for the demonstration projects of sustainable community development.

Following committee reviews, three communities were selected for the 2008 demonstrative projects and four for the 2009 demonstrative projects. Based on the environmental characteristics, criteria for the communities selected for the 2008 demonstration focused on the following dimensions: community buildings, recreational agriculture and hillside development. In 2009, criteria for the selected communities focused on the following dimensions: community landscaping, ecological corridors, LOHAS and environmental education facilities. The selected demonstrative communities for 2008 and 2009 display a pluralistic nature, and thus capable of providing a foundation for developing different sustainable community types.

In 2012, CENT selected four advanced communities to continue the sustainable community development projects; two communities are the same as those involved in the 2008–2009 projects. In 2013, CENT undertook a three-month sustainable community development project for these communities (with additional 10 communities). Based on these sustainable community development projects, four relationships can be extracted between communities and CENT (Figure 14.1).

In Type 1, CENT helps communities to clarify their goals so that they can establish their own networks. In Type 2, CENT participates in community activities and helps communities to further develop more sub-goals. In Type 3, communities have diversified networks and are effective in undertaking different development projects; CENT helps them to clarify the relationships among different goals. In Type 4, CENT helps to identify networks in order to help communities achieve their goals.

Figure 14.1Four sustainable community development approaches.

Implementation of sustainable community development: Jiantan Community

Following the two-year demonstrative sustainable community development program, these selected communities continued to undertake numerous community activities, including environmental education workshops, capacity building programs and social welfare/community care programs. Of the seven demonstrative communities, Jiantan Community received the Best Garden City Community Beautification Award in 2010, Taiwan’s 100 Excellent Communities in 2011, Taipei’s Environmental Education Community in 2012, one of the six finalists for Taiwan’s Environmental Education Community in 2013 and the LivCom Awards (Bronze) in 2013, thus demonstrating that this community offers many valuable experiences. Following the 2008–2009 demonstrative programs, Taipei City Government, with the assistance from CENT and other NGOs, continues to help Jiantan Community move towards a sustainable community from the following four approaches.

Environmental education workshop

A lack of knowledge and skills in effective engagement within complex systems, as well as competing priorities of participating organizations, prevents the full implementation of community empowerment (Fawcett et al. 2010). To rise to this challenge, implementing the core valu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I The sustainable city in Asia
• Section II Challenges and regional perspectives
• Section III Shaping the sustainable city in Asia
• Index