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交流文宣：寶藏巖(English)
ab003 發表於 2006/10/13 下午 08:50:00

The Treasure Hill  Co-living Commune Project

The Treasure Hill is a shabby village on Guan-Yin Hill on the Hsin-Dian river waterfront in West-South Taipei. The Treasure-Hill community is basically a fringe hillside settlement of about 200 urban squatters and their families.

After the War in 1949, the great retreat of the Nationalist government ushered in an abrupt migration flux to the Capital city, which amounted to more than 330,000 immigrants from Mainland China at a very short span of time. The shortage of housing supply was partially compensated by self-help squatter buildings mushrooming at various blocks and areas in the city, many of which were then and later designated as urban parks for future land use.

In the late 1940s, the Treasure Hill settlement was composed of only 6 dredger families adapting the military bunkers left over from the colonial time, and the ban for hillside construction was still effective. The Nationalist government reinforced its military role at the city edge, the Hill was restricted to the use of military units. Yet the guarding soldiers started to build shelters to accommodate their private needs on the steep hill, and the landscape gradually sprawled from temporary structures by the shrine into an organic village of humble, second-hand-material-based, mutually dependent houses intertwined by labyrinthine alleys and steps. The city government turned a blind eye to the illegal activities going on under the shield of a military restriction area, yet the indifferent official response to the squatter village in the making summoned more new immigrants to join the self-help, self-built mode of urban living at the edge. In 1970s the treasure hill attracted new waves of immigrants from the rural areas of Taiwan to establish their affordable though unsteady standings in the city.

At the peak of its evolution, the Treasure-Hill Settlement was the second homeland of about 200 families and individuals. The community is composition of the social or economical disadvantaged people including senile citizens, single veterans, social underclass, students, South-East Asian immigrants, and so forth. Under its informal appearance, it reminisces the city's organic past and manifests the tacit understanding of the community's spatial structure. The residents' ingenious uses of public and semi-public spaces  - makeshift arcade, waterfront farmland, terrace gardens, corner-store plaza with movable chairs, outdoor cinema, to name a few - exhibit a collective local wisdom which few conscious designers could ever achieve. This mundane hillside society could have continued to lead an ordinary village life if it was not zoned as an urban park according to the city's renewed urban plan of 1980. In 1993, the official announcement of tearing down the squatter was posted and mailed to all residents. The Treasure-Hill story entered a new chapter. The conservation issue of the treasure Hill was noticed.

The intellectuals, NGOs, and local citizens; yet contradicted the rationale of Taipei's modernist planning which prioritizes urban function as a whole over collective memories of the few. Driven by the panic of insecure livelihood, many original residents chose to abandon their houses and left, but those who were not able to or refused to move began to work with volunteer activists to claim their standing in the Treasure Hill and to evict the threat of the "green bulldozer."

After a series of organized protest and intensive study, the city government took a few steps back to survey the feasibility of a plan revision. Soon the planning responsibility for the Treasure Hill Settlement was transferred from the Department of Park and Recreation to the Bureau of Cultural Affairs. Though once stigmatized by some urban discourses as the tumor of a pro-growth city, the Treasure-Hill Settlement is also ironically romanticized as a hillside village, which bears the potential of an community with differential space makings. Either viewpoint cannot fairly depict the situation of the Settlement today. Even if the progressive thinking of conserving the physical setting and the social fabric of the Treasure-Hill Settlement is encouraging, the destiny of the remaining squatters in around 50 housing units seems ambiguous.

After all, the land is public and planned for park use,to legitimatize the squatters' residency in the public land requires an experimental programming and many break-throughs in terms of planning regulations. OURs (the Organization of Urban Re-s) is now commissioned by the Bureau of Cultural Affairs to undertake such a task, and for the time being, we intend to propose a "co-living commune" which will incorporate the original resident units as "alternative social housing," a youth hostel, and an artist-in-residences program. All the residents of the new village will share the facilities of a co-kitchen, co-dining room, waterfront organic gardens and farms, a co-op neighborhood store, and various workshops for recycled-material arts and creative theatres, etc.

The organizer emphasized the processes of sustainable community development, and the possibilities for integrating culture and ecology with public participation. It is a long-term process that respects both social and ecological communities contexts. This should also mean a respect for the built environment and the history of its evolution as well as the ecological possibilities for further development, meaning for example an integration of local resource potentials such as solar energy, rainwater, and creative uses of plants and landscaping. Today, the restoration of the physical structures is moving on. And we look forward to your possible participation in the Treasure Hill any time here in Taipei.

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