Article

Urban Studies
2018, Vol. 55(13) 2886–2902
Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2017
Entrepreneurialising urban Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
informality: Transforming DOI: 10.1177/0042098017726739
journals.sagepub.com/home/usj
governance of informal settlements
in Taipei

Ker-hsuan Chien
National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Abstract
Informality is a common urban experience among cities in the Global South. Given the thin social
welfare and weak regulations, the urban subaltern has therefore had to improvise housing and
employment in order to survive. Urban informality is hence conceived as a negotiation process
through which spatial value is produced. However, under the current wave of urban entrepre-
neurialisation, informality is often deemed to be inefficient and unproductive in the new economy
that the local governments are trying to build. Many of the informal settlements have been subject
to demolition in order to make room for new urban development projects. With the cases of
waterfront regeneration projects in Taipei, this paper argues that entrepreneurialism and inform-
ality are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, through their co-evolution, urban informality
actually contributes to the variegation of urban entrepreneurialism. This paper demonstrates
how the urban squatters have managed to re-engage informality and urban development by
actively participating in the shaping of the entrepreneurial discourses, reinventing their informal
settlements as a key feature that contributes to the city’s economic development. However,
although this entwining of entrepreneurialism and informality has brought new opportunities to
the informal settlements, it has at the same time presented new threats to their current way of
life. By focusing on the entrepreneurialising of urban informality, this paper offers a grounded per-
spective on the ways in which the urban subaltern has reacted to the unfolding urban entrepre-
neurialism in Taiwan.

Keywords
entrepreneurialism, Global South, Taiwan, urban informality, urban redevelopment, urbanisation
and developing countries

Corresponding author:
Ker-hsuan Chien, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4,
Roosevelt Rd., Taipei City 10617, Taiwan.
Email: kerhsuanchien@gmail.com
Chien
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Received October 2016; accepted July 2017
Introduction
In recent years the concept of urban inform-
ality has been discussed comprehensively in
urban studies. To postcolonial urban theor-
ists (Robinson, 2016; Roy, 2016), studying
the formation and evolving process of urban
informality is not only an addition to
empirical cases in the understanding of
urban formation, but it also offers us a
grounded perspective from the Global South
cities. Since it focuses on what struggling
people go through in order to survive, it illu-
minates our understanding of contemporary
urban subaltern lives. The focus of urban
informality offers a way to conceptualise the
delicate interaction between local housing
demand, urban governance, local knowledge
of negotiating with urban regulations, and
most importantly, the creative methods
which people use to cope with the neolibera-
lising urban development (Ascensão, 2016;
Erman, 2016; McFarlane, 2012a; Yeo et al.,
2012). In these cases, informality under
urban development is more than a subject of
oppression and exclusion, it is also an active
agent capable of co-shaping and co-
cultivating the urban reality that is being
2887
lived in. Examining different forms of urban
informality therefore contributes to the var-
iegated understanding of urbanisation and
subaltern conditions under neoliberal urban
transition.
Informality has been a part of Taipei’s
urban life throughout its development.
Informal settlements have always been cru-
cial facilities that absorb newcomers, foster-
ing the urban subaltern given the city’s thin
welfare system. However, since informal set-
tlements have been deemed inefficient and
chaotic in relation to modern sanitation and
public safety standards, they have also often
been subject to control, reformed (forma-
lised), or demolished under new urban devel-
opment plans.
This paper aims to bring this conversa-
tion into the discussion of entrepreneurial
urbanism, exploring the impact that entre-
preneurialism has had on Taipei’s urban
informality, especially informal settlements.
With the case of Taipei’s waterfront regen-
eration project, this paper demonstrates how
people in urban informal settlements man-
aged to retain their houses by participating
in the shaping of entrepreneurial discourses.
2888
In order to keep living in the same place,
they reinvented their informal settlements as
a key feature that would contribute to the
city’s economic development.
This paper is based on research I con-
ducted in 2011 and 2012. During this period,
squatters along the Liu-Gong channel and
some from the Xi-Jou tribe were working
with planning experts from National Taiwan
University (hereafter NTU) against local
government plans to demolish the informal
houses for waterfront rehabilitation. I car-
ried out 21 interviews, including ones with
squatters, local residents, local government
officers, and planning experts from NTU to
see what discourse was employed in the
waterfront renovation project, and how
squatters and local people were responding
to the renovation project. The interviews
were conducted in Chinese and later trans-
lated into English by the author.
This paper begins with a brief introduc-
tion to its main scope. In the second part, I
specify what I mean by entrepreneurialisa-
tion and urban informality through review-
ing previous works on these two issues. I
also elaborate on how urban entrepreneuri-
alism and urban informality intertwine,
becoming a co-producing force that shapes
the urban landscape. In the third part, this
paper illustrates how entrepreneurialism gra-
dually made its way to Taiwan and was
translated into Taipei’s urban policy. In the
fourth section, this paper stresses how this
entrepreneurialisation of urban informal set-
tlements has reshaped the way of life in
informal settlements, and transformed the
local informality. In conclusion, I argue that
entrepreneurialising urban informality
should not be understood as a solution for
the social exclusion led by urban entrepre-
neurialism. Rather, it offers a closer look at
the variegated forms of urban entrepreneur-
ialisation, and new ways to conceptualise
the local issues caused by the encounter of
informality and entrepreneurialism.
Urban Studies 55(13)
Urban informality and
entrepreneurial urbanism
The discussions on entrepreneurial urbanism
over the last two decades have provided dif-
ferent approaches to urban transition in cit-
ies worldwide. Along with economic
globalisation, cities are competing with each
other for the role of key strategic node of
‘command and control’ in the global urban
network (Sassen, 2001). New types of urban
space production are also spreading rapidly
across cities. Entrepreneurial city therefore
became the common urban strategy for the
spatial restructuring to cope with economic
globalisation. Urban governments thus
evolve accordingly to be more innovative
and entrepreneurial to attract the flows of
capital and talents (Harvey, 1989). Urban
strategies such as urban renewal and place
making were also employed to create
location-specific advantages, making cities
more suitable for living and consuming
(Jessop and Sum, 2000). Under this urban
space restructuring, concerns about social
exclusion have also been raised. With new
partnerships formed by local governments
and private investors, urban spaces have
been reclaimed by global capital and tourists
in the name of urban regeneration (Smith,
2002). As a result, people such as squatters,
homeless people, beggars and prostitutes
were systematically excluded from this con-
sumerist landscape. In this sense, urban
regeneration is the embodiment of gentrifi-
cation. A revanchist city became the urban
policy widely adopted in European and
North American cities to gain their advan-
tages in global capital circulation (MacLeod,
2002; Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Along with
the policy transferring between cities
(McCann and Ward, 2011), this new form of
urban space production has become a com-
mon issue across cities around the world
(Lees, 2012). Under the circumstances, com-
parative urbanism has been proposed to
Chien
recontextualise the encounter and mutate
between the mobile entrepreneurial urban
policy and local political economy (Harris,
2008; McFarlane, 2010). Urban informality
therefore offers a subaltern perspective on
entrepreneurial urbanism.
Urban informality is often comprehended
in two ways. From the perspective of private
ownership, squatters were people who have
no private ownership of the properties they
live in. This lack of legal entitlement makes
the informal houses ‘dead capital’, leaving
the squatters with little access to capital
market (De Soto, 2000). Nevertheless, given
the complex effect legalisation may bring,
legalising informal properties does very little
for alleviating poverty (Durand-Lasserve
and Selod, 2009; Gilbert, 2002; Payne et al.,
2009). From the planning point of view,
urban informality is construed to be an
idiom of urbanisation, through which the
differential spatial value is produced (Roy
and AlSayyad, 2004). Since informality is
often understood as the dwelling without
planning apparatus, it indicates a mode of
grassroots urbanisation, providing a down-
to-earth perspective of the local struggle of
poverty and inequality (Roy, 2005). Such
elucidation of local agency makes informal-
ity instrumental to subaltern study. Given
that the power relation and local norms
from the megacities are often different from
the urban experiences from the West, scruti-
nising these local nuances may shed new
light on urban studies (Roy, 2011). By stres-
sing the agency local people exhibit in their
daily encounters with local construction
rules, or their entrepreneurial practices to
extricate themselves from poverty, we can
therefore move beyond the stereotypical
understanding toward cities of the Global
South. This overstepping ‘limits of archival
and ethnographic recognition’ (Roy, 2011:
223) could foster new epistemological and
methodological understanding toward urban
(see Schindler, 2014). Roy (2011) therefore
2889
marks the subaltern production of urban
space as subaltern urbanism, bringing the
idea of subaltern to the realm of urban stud-
ies. Yet, though Roy (2011) employs slums
as the main ‘itinerary’ of subaltern urban
space, Schindler (2014) argues that other
urban spaces should not be precluded from
qualifying as subaltern urban space. By cast-
ing slums as one in the many forms of subal-
tern urban space, subaltern urbanism thus
can be broadened into a comparative inves-
tigation between the North–South divide,
thinking urban space in terms of subaltern/
non-subaltern meshwork. Urban informality
therefore can be applied as a conceptual tool
for elucidating the political agencies of sub-
altern urban life.
In light of their work, McFarlane (2012b)
argued against thinking about informality in
territorial terms, regarding informal settle-
ments merely as a space excluded by urban
entrepreneurialism. Instead, urban informal-
ity could be understood as a local agency
contributing to diverse trajectories of entre-
preneurial urbanism. Focusing on the co-
production of urban entrepreneurialism
between global institutions, local states, civil
society activists, and the informal settlements
in Mumbai, McFarlane (2012a) delineated
how the entrepreneurial urbanism has
reformed to include the urban poor. In this
sense, urban informality is a path to under-
standing how risk-taking, self-managing
minorities co-produce entrepreneurialisation
with the urban elite, and how new techniques
and models are forged through variegated
forms of entrepreneurialisation. This paper
therefore aims to delineate how urban
informality, especially informal settlements,
co-produces entrepreneurial urbanism with
the state, and with planning experts.
Urban informality is often overthrown by
entrepreneurialising urban policy. As urban
informality was a spontaneous effort made
by local people to improve their living con-
ditions, the unmethodical construction or
2890
flexible employment can seem to be disorga-
nised, or even chaotic. These characters
make them appear primitive and counter-
productive, which makes the informality
incongruous with the state’s vision of a mod-
ernised city, and therefore should be
reformed by state power. In previous cases
in Africa, Asia and Latin America, we have
seen urban informal settlements denied access
to infrastructural services, such as water, elec-
tricity, public transportation, (Desai et al.,
2015; Graham and McFarlane, 2014;
Graham and Marvin, 2001; McFarlane,
2008), or being subjected to formalisation,
upgrading or demolition by new regeneration
projects (Desai and Loftus, 2013; Erman,
2016; Ghertner, 2008; Harris, 2008). Urban
informality appears to be rather vulnerable to
the entrepreneurial urban development, espe-
cially via the measure of urban regeneration.
However, in certain cases urban informality
and entrepreneurialism have grown into each
other, co-forming the contemporary urban
landscape. In the case of the informal market-
place in Singapore, the informal night-time
economy became an incubator for small busi-
nesses started mainly by new immigrants,
providing easy access to the market for new
enterprises and a hospitable environment for
migrant workers. In short, they provide urban
migrants with a new chance to thrive in this
world city (Yeo and Heng, 2014; Yeo et al.,
2012). In Lisbon, the informal settlements
gradually developed as different waves of
migrants from the country’s former colonies
settled in the city. As time elapsed these infor-
mal settlements became an urban assemblage
of squatters and their low-fi living conditions.
Although this urban assemblage did provide
roofs over heads and social networks for the
migrants to survive urban life, the basic archi-
tectural forms and the shaming of slums also
made the squatters vulnerable to sickness and
difficult for them to find decent jobs
(Ascensão, 2016). In Northern Ankara, this
human agency is also shown in the re-
Urban Studies 55(13)
informalisation of the middle class-oriented
apartments via the dwellers’ everyday prac-
tices of gathering, cooking, and fluffing
carpets in the public spaces. This re-
informalisation also creates new conflicts
between the squatter practices and the mod-
ern, middle-class lifestyle that the social hous-
ing project was seeking in the first place
(Erman, 2016). The focus on human agency
in urban informality distinguishes the resili-
ence of the urban subaltern, which seems to
always manage to negotiate a way to more
living spaces and a more flexible management
system under tightened urban regulations. In
order to further scrutinise how exactly the
squatters’ agency functions in the urban
entrepreneurial project, this paper stresses the
interactions between the globalised urban
entrepreneurialism and the local agency of
Taipei’s squatters. With the cases of Taipei’s
waterfront redevelopment project and the
local squatters’ resistance for relocation, this
paper focuses on a few questions. How was
urban entrepreneurialism employed by the
local government as its urban strategy? How
do the squatters interpret and react to such
urban transformation? What kind of impact
has this urban entrepreneurialism had on
Taipei’s informality? And how does this
urban entrepreneurialism variegate upon its
encounter with urban informality?
Before further discussion, in the next sec-
tion I explain how informality became a part
of Taipei’s urban life, and how this inform-
ality and urban entrepreneurialism were first
regarded as mutually exclusive in urban
development.
Informality in
entrepreneurialising Taipei
Urban informality has existed since Taipei’s
rapid post-war urbanisation back in the
1960s. Since the local government was
unable to provide sufficient urban housing,
the local administration had to let the
Chien
informal building issue slide. Therefore, infor-
mal settlement became a common solution
for the lack of urban housing to the urban
poor, especially the migrants from mainland
China after the Chinese Civil War in 1949
(a.k.a. mainlanders) and the urban migrants.
In order to fit themselves into the urban life,
people improvised under the circumstances.
Informal houses were built on the unused
waterfronts and parklands so people could
afford to live in the city. Throughout the
urbanisation process, the urban informality in
Taiwan evolved into variety of forms, accom-
modating people from different economic sta-
tuses and social backgrounds. Shanty towns
were built to shelter the mainlanders and
urban migrants with low income; informal
extensions to formal constructions were built
so that people could have additional rooms to
use in the densely packed city. By the 1990s,
the informal constructions had become a
common urban experience, a way of living in
Taipei. However, this form of urban inform-
ality was not unregulated. In order to stop
the informal buildings from further increase,
a new policy was announced in 1995 to tackle
the issue. In the ‘Direction Regarding Illegal
Construction Management’ announced by
Taipei City Government, all the unlicensed
new constructions would be demolished
immediately once reported. As for the infor-
mal constructions built before 1994, they
would be demolished only if they were threa-
tening public safety, breaching the public
sanitation code, or were at odds with the new
urban plan. This new law could be construed
as a local policy to cope with urban entrepre-
neurialism. Since Taiwan was undergoing an
economic transition under globalisation in
the 1990s, the Taiwanese government
therefore actively intervened in Taipei’s
development, aiming to make Taipei a hub
of capital and product flows in East and
South East Asia (Hsu, 2005). In order to
make the city more competitive in terms of
2891
physical infrastructures and environment
for investment, the city was undergoing
spatial restructuring (Chou, 2005).
Financial liberalisation and public–private
partnership were thus introduced to urban
governance, along with the implementation
of urban renewal plans and urban mega-
projects (Wang, 2004). With new CBDs
planned, roads widened, and sewage pipes
unfolded, private capital was channelled to
urban spaces to facilitate urban redevelop-
ment. Given that shanty towns and encroach-
ments were often built in public spaces such as
reserved parkland and waterfront, the urban
regeneration ended up enveloping the revan-
chist urbanism that reclaimed urban spaces
from the squatters (Jou et al., 2016).
Therefore, the new law launched to regulate
informal constructions could be understood a
policy tool to outlaw the informal buildings
that were incompatible with Taipei’s new
entrepreneurial strategy. The existence of
squatter settlements was problematised as an
obstruction of urban redevelopment, a defi-
ciency that needed to be rectified, or elimi-
nated. This policy-led urban regeneration plan
combined with the newly launched illegal con-
struction management rule made the informal
buildings extremely vulnerable to demolition.
The eviction of informal settlement in the
reserved parklands fourteen and fifteen in
1997, for instance, was one significant case in
the conflict between the city’s entrepreneurial
policy and informality. This informal buildings
agglomeration consisted of more than 900
informal buildings with roughly 2000 squat-
ters, accommodating mainlanders and urban
migrants since the urbanisation of the 1970s.
As this informal settlement was situated in the
old urban centre, it soon became a clear target
for demolition under the city’s regeneration
plan of 1997. To the then mayor, the demoli-
tion of the informal buildings was essential for
Taipei to become attractive to the global talent
and capital flow:
2892
In a wealthy city like Taipei, this [community]
is the tumour of the city, the shame of citizens.
It is unimaginable that right next to the world
famous Regent Taipei Hotel are more than a
thousand people living in a graveyard. (United
Daily News, 10 November 1996).
To the local government at that time, infor-
mal settlements represented the city’s disor-
ganisation and inefficiency, and were ill-
fitted to the entrepreneurial city that Taipei
was eager to become. In order to make the
city more attractive to foreign investment,
the issue of informality had to be contained.
This is to say that informality was recog-
nised as unsuitable for the entrepreneurial
urbanism, and therefore had to be elimi-
nated. However, this antagonism was later
transformed through the co-production of
entrepreneurial urban policy, local commu-
nities and planning experts. Although the
informal settlements were often considered
to be incompatible with the urban entrepre-
neurialising projects, and were relocated and
demolished in these projects, this form of
exclusion also triggered a new wave of rising
local entrepreneurship. In response to the
demand for a more enticing metropolitan
area, the local communities started actively
participating in the making of entrepreneur-
ial Taipei. In the following sections, I
demarcate how waterfront regeneration is
employed by Taipei County as an entrepre-
neurial strategy for urban development, and
how two communities – Liu-Gong informal
settlement and Xi-Jou tribe – have co-
evolved with urban entrepreneurialism.
Entrepreneurialising urban
informality
River County project: Taipei County’s
waterfront regeneration
The ‘River County’ project served as Taipei
County’s spatial restructuring to facilitate
Urban Studies 55(13)
Taipei’s entrepreneurialisation. Since county
waterfronts were normally neglected spaces,
occupied by illegal factories and informal
settlements, they have been targeted to be
renovated and prettified, as a way to attract
capital investment and tourists to the county.
As the aforementioned case of informal set-
tlement in the reserved parklands fourteen
and fifteen in 1997, informal settlements
were soon problematised under such entre-
preneurial urban policy.
The informal houses along the Liu-Gong
channel were built along the one-time irriga-
tion system. Given that the channel flows
along a military camp, the Liu-Gong channel
informal house occupiers therefore mostly
consisted of mainlanders who came with the
Chiang Kai-Shek regime after the Chinese
Civil War. Since many mainlander-veterans
were discharged without proper housing
plans or with only a small pension, they had
to improvise in order to survive. Therefore,
some of these veterans ended up dwelling
along the small space between the Liu-Gong
channel and the Zhong-Xin military camp.
Over years, this informal settlement became
an agglomeration of people who could not
afford housing in the private housing mar-
ket. Through urbanisation, the channel had
been turned into urban drainage and had
become heavily polluted. Therefore, in 2005,
Taipei County Government decided to reno-
vate the channel, making the waterfront
more efficient for the local government, as a
part of the county’s redevelopment plan, the
‘River County’ project. As informal houses
were not licenced constructions, they were
normally excluded from the sewerage sys-
tem. The informal settlement was thus con-
veniently problematised for both sanitary
and economic reasons, being shamed for dis-
charging sewerage into the channel and
remaining an eyesore for the county. Fu-Te
is the borough chief of the Hsin-De neigh-
bourhood, where the informal settlement is
Chien
situated. Like many people in the city, he
attributed the deterioration of the Liu-Gong
channel directly to the informal settlement:
The neighbourhood by now has mostly con-
nected to the sewerage system, only the front
ones [meaning the informal houses] were left
out. [.] Some of the houses even have no sep-
tic tank, so the sewerage just goes straight to
the channel.
Held responsible for the channel’s pollution,
urban informality is seen to be at odds with
modern sanitation standards, and therefore
must be demolished for the waterfront reno-
vation to unfold. As a civil servant in the
Urban and Rural Development Department
pointed out in an interview:
If we don’t demolish the informal settlement,
we wouldn’t be able to accomplish what we’ve
envisioned [for this channel].
In this way, the demolition of the informal
settlement was directly engaged with the
channel’s renovation, encompassing both
sanitation and development reasons. This
engagement rendered the demolition a
technical issue for the waterfront renovation
project, sequentially depoliticising the dis-
placement it would inevitably lead to, since
the squatters were unlikely to be able to
afford other housing in the same neighbour-
hood. Being part of the County’s regenera-
tion plan, this renovation project emphasises
the revitalisation of the waterfront, instead
of just the upgrading of the urban infra-
structure. It aims to bring new investment,
urban migrants and new job opportunities
to the area, regenerating the local economy.
As stated by another civil servant in the
county government:
Once the sewage was piped to the main sys-
tem, you would stop smelling the stink almost
immediately, and all the rats, roaches, and
mosquitoes would be gone. They would not
only be able to enjoy a better living
2893
environment, but also their houses would
worth a lot more and being much easier to
sell.
By engaging the unfolding of sewerage sys-
tems with the economic incentive of real-
estate growth, the River County project
became a hegemonic project among local
property owners, forming a new consensus to
revitalise the local economy through boosting
the housing market. In order to ensure this
renovation could be carried out smoothly,
the local government thus employed the com-
munity planning system to engage the local
people into the renovation project.
The community planning system was
introduced in Taiwan in the 1980s as the
government’s penetration to the local soci-
ety. Along with the democratisation and
neoliberalisation of Taipei’s urban govern-
ance, the community planning system has
been professionalised, and has become a
main measure for authorities to negotiate
with local communities (Huang and Hsu,
2011). These community planners are usually
from academic backgrounds, trained by the
government programme and licensed. Under
the community planning scheme, the com-
munity planners are expected to have long-
term partnerships with the local commu-
nities, so that they could propose proper
community projects that would respond to
local needs. Although the community plan-
ning projects are often local propositions to
be reviewed and approved by the planning
committee of the local governments, some
projects, such as the Liu-Gong channel’s
renovation, are directly contracted out by
the government as a part of the urban devel-
opment plan. This is when the community
planners can be mobilised by government as
a means of finding a way for its grand plan.
In the case of Liu-Gong channel’s renova-
tion, local meetings were held to explain how
the renovation project might enhance the
local environment, without fully disclosing
2894
the impact the project might have on local
squatters. As a second-generation squatter
Jing-Yi1 stated:
When they told us they were going to renovate
here in 2007, everyone was excited about it.
We thought they were only planning to
straighten the area, make it more beautiful. It
wasn’t until they held the second meeting,
mentioning about turning this area into a
park, that we started to realise what this whole
project is all about.
To the local government, rehabilitating the
waterfront, and regenerating the local real-
estate development was its primary concern.
The community planners were merely
employed to ensure the government’s water-
front renovation could be carried out with-
out problems. Given that the rehabilitation
of the urban waterfront was deeply framed
in the economic rationale of gaining Taipei
County’s advantage in the competition for
middle class urban migrants and invest-
ments, it overwhelmingly incorporated the
middle class in the city, leaving local squat-
ters alone facing demolition and possible
displacement. However, although the water-
front renovation was expected to regenerate
the area, it turned out that this was not the
only proposal for local regeneration. In
order to keep their homes in the waterfront,
squatters started taking part in the shaping
of the local development project. Rejecting
their being shaped as an impediment for the
local regeneration, the squatters instead rein-
vented themselves as a local attraction that
would facilitate the county redevelopment.
Liu-Gong informal settlement as an historic
site
The Liu-Gong channel renovation project
appeared as a top-down entrepreneurial proj-
ect that aimed to regenerate the local econ-
omy. In this renovation project, the informal
settlement was treated as a part of the
Urban Studies 55(13)
reason, if not the only one, for the bad shape
of the Liu-Gong channel. Through combin-
ing the renovation with the local economic
development, the renovation aimed to shape
a subject that would prioritise local develop-
ment, seeing the demolition of informal set-
tlements as inevitable for both economic and
sanitary reasons. In order to keep their
homes, the squatters then organised a local
movement to defend their way of life. Jing-
Yi became a main organiser of this move-
ment. As many squatters were old veterans
and their spouses, who were mostly over 70
years old by this time, they decided to take
relatively mild action, petitioning to keep the
informal settlement, instead of protesting
against the renovation project. As Jing-Yi
further explained:
We avoid the word ‘protest’ in our movement.
Since there were many seniors involved in this
[movement], confronting [the local govern-
ment] might be too onerous for them.
In order to keep their homes without direct
confrontation with the local government,
they decided to negotiate with the local gov-
ernment for sustenance of the community by
re-shaping the local regeneration project. To
sustain their dwellings along the waterfront,
they re-joined urban informality with entre-
preneurialism, strategically embracing urban
entrepreneurialism, presenting themselves as
living history, evidence of Taipei’s informal-
ity, so the value of their existence could be
acknowledged.
Using community planning as the chan-
nel, the informal settlement in 2011 counter-
proposed different versions of waterfront
renovation, actively reincorporating the
informal settlement into the urban entrepre-
neurialism to fit themselves into the new
urban project. In the case of the informal
houses along the Liu-Gong channel, they
proposed the idea of turning the community
into a cultural landscape. They argued that
Chien
the informal houses along the Liu-Gong
channel existed not only as a witness to
Taipei’s urban development, but that their
existence also added another layer to the
city’s cultural essence, which could easily be
cashed in on through the city’s real-estate
and tourist development. To fit the commu-
nity and the channel into the county govern-
ment’s plan of water renovation, local
people began to actively engage with the
renovation project. Jing-Yi illustrated her
vision for the channel in our interview:
If we can separate the sewer [from the channel]
and treat it, the channel should be a nice place,
where we can enjoy the stream running beside
us. [.] Sometimes when I walk along the alley,
I do find the zigzag of the alley enjoyable. I
notice there were some nostalgic trends going
on, why can’t we keep the old houses, instead
of tearing them down, while building new, fake
ones?
By suggesting the connection of informal
buildings to the sewerage system, Jing-Yi
deconstructed the antagonistic relationship
between urban sanitation/development and
the sustaining of informal settlements. To
Jing-Yi, renovation of the channel and the
existence of the informal settlement were
compatible. By subsuming the informal set-
tlement as a part of the rehabilitation, not
only would the urban waterscape be sani-
tised, but also the quirkiness of the informal
buildings could at the same time offer more
opportunities for tourism or real-estate
development. Since the Liu-Gong channel
community was formed over a long period,
constructed entirely according to the needs
of each individual household, the rustic,
untidy appearance and the unmethodical
clustering of the informal buildings were in
drastic contrast with the modern congregate
housing nearby. To Jing-Yi, it is this unique
semblance of the informal settlement that
should be considered as a part of the city’s
2895
attraction, as a cultural, historic facxade of
modern Taipei.
This style of building is not only peculiar
in appearance, but it also shapes people’s
interaction within the community. In many
cases of informal buildings, the houses
would start as a small private room on the
shore, then gradually extended toward the
channel as a walkway, then as kitchen or toi-
let, since the channel was expected to take
the household sewage away. This unconven-
tional way of spatial arrangement largely
increased the community’s solidarity, as
Jing-Yi portrayed in our interview:
Granny Wang is the elder, and the representa-
tive of the community, so we often go chat in
her place or play Chinese chess in No. 7 [refer-
encing the number of a house]. These are our
public spaces, where we engage with each
other. Every day we chat, we share our lives
together, and it has been like this for thirty
years.
As described by Jing-Yi, extension spaces
were flexibly used as walkways, storage, or
rooms for gathering; they greatly increased
the chances for people to meet and interact
with each other, and consequently enhanced
the closeness of the community.
Together, the crooked alley, the rustic
buildings, and the intimate social relations
interweave into an unadorned way of living,
in contrast with the condominiums lining
nearby, filled with households that barely
know each other. To counteract the county
government’s plan of rationalising the neigh-
bourhood, the Liu-Gong channel squatters
engineered the cultural features of their
houses to re-engage them with the urban
redevelopment project, turning the commu-
nity into a cultural/tourist attraction. With
the help from many associated NGOs, the
local residents actively marketed the settle-
ments as an historic/cultural site in the city
by holding a photo gala in the community
2896
as a showcase of their everyday lives. They
hoped the old pictures taken from this com-
munity’s past could remind people of how
this community had struggled through the
city’s development, showing this community
as a survivor from the poor days, not just
the heavily polluted informal settlement it
appears to be right now. During the gala,
the squatters intentionally left their clothes
on hangers in front of their homes as a part
of the exhibition, like they normally do in
the mornings, to provide people a sense of
the informal settlement’s daily lives, and to
make the community more relatable.
By distinguishing the cultural value of the
community, the commercial potentials of the
informal settlements could thus be recognised.
The idea of distinguishing the local informal-
ity as a form of urban lifestyle is the result of
consulting with the planning experts from
NTU. As these planning experts are mainly
scholars and graduate students with a back-
ground of architecture and urban planning,
they were quite familiar with the entrepreneur-
ial discourse that engages waterfront renova-
tion with local redevelopment. Hence, instead
of stressing the local squatters’ rights to the
city, putting them at the opposite side of the
urban hegemonic project, they decided to
adapt to the urban entrepreneurial project. By
making the counter-proposal of redefining
urban informality as Taiwan’s urban cultural
character, it reconciled the informality with
the urban entrepreneurialism, turning the
informality into a strength of Taipei County’s
competiveness in terms of living and tourism.
Such combining of urban informality
with entrepreneurialism also offers economic
incentives for the neighbourhood nearby,
gaining support for the counter-proposal.
As Fu-Te told me, the cultural landscape
project changed his opinion about the sus-
taining of the informal settlement:
Of course the people at this side do not want
them to become a ‘historic site’, we want them
Urban Studies 55(13)
gone. [.] If the government could remodel the
street, like they did for the Shen-Keng Old
Street, then it would be a different case. [.]
Like in the case of the Shen-Keng Old Street,
the small businesses [along the street] really
picked up since the place was rehabilitated.
However, if they stay unrefined, then I would
prefer them to be torn down. [.] As the head
of the neighbourhood, I think the houses could
stay if the government can turn the place into
a tourist attraction. If they don’t, then the
place should be demolished.
In this sense, the River County project could
be understood as a discursive practice that
shapes the subjectivity of people like Fu-Te.
To Fu-Te, the meaning of sustaining the
informal settlement depends entirely on the
tourist potential they could possibly provide
for the county. To the neighbourhoods
nearby, the informal settlement in the cur-
rent state was a source of negative environ-
mental and aesthetical impacts. Hence the
informal settlement had to be transformed,
converted into a more pleasant environment
in order to fit the liveable urban space that
local government had committed to creating.
In this sense, the strategy of incorporating
urban informality into urban entrepreneuri-
alism is an act of pragmatism, through which
the squatters negotiate their stay by market
rule, rather than their right to the houses
per se.
Making Xi-Jou tribe an Aboriginal Cultural
Park
Another case of entrepreneurialising inform-
ality is the establishing of the Xi-Jou tribe as
the Aboriginal Cultural Park. The Xi-Jou
tribe was an urban tribe that was mainly
made up of indigenous people from eastern
Taiwan, who migrated to the city to seek
jobs during the urbanisation of the 1980s. In
order to deal with economic hardship, and at
the same time maintain their traditional life-
style, they ended up settled in the watershed
Chien
of Xin-Dian stream, a tributary of the Tam-
Sui river. When the county government
decided to redevelop the county by restoring
the waterfronts, the Xi-Jou tribe became the
target of another waterfront renovation
project called ‘The Big Bi-Tan project’. The
Big Bi-Tan project is also a part of the River
County project. It aimed to remove all the
constructions in the waterfront and relocate
the people to a public housing estate, as the
waterfront squatters were deemed to be
endangered by the floods. However, this
relocation plan jeopardised the squatters’
way of life on two levels. First, compared
with their current state, living in public hous-
ing would raise their household expenses
since they would be obliged to pay rent. This
financial burden would have the greatest
impact on those who were currently unem-
ployed, and were in difficulties. The second
impact on the tribe was cultural. To the peo-
ple in the tribe, living in the place they had
co-developed was a crucial part of maintain-
ing their tribal way of life. The relocation
project planned to re-accommodate the
squatters in huge condominiums 20 km
away, which would sabotage their existing
function as a tribe. Therefore, people in the
tribe organised a local movement, protesting
against the relocation plan. In this move-
ment, the tribe was argued to be culturally
significant in terms of its well-balanced style
between tribal and urban life. People in the
tribe could work as construction workers,
delivery people, or any other jobs during the
day, while living as elders and villagers when
they were home. Once the tribe was relo-
cated, this unique lifestyle would also gradu-
ally be extinguished. With the assistance of
the volunteering planning experts from
NTU, the Xi-Jou tribe eventually proposed
the Xi-Jou Aboriginal Cultural Park to
negotiate their way into the urban entrepre-
neurial project of waterfront regeneration.
In this renewed plan, the informal settlement
was re-assigned by the local government as
2897
an indigenous cultural zone, in which the
indigenous people could live and develop
tourism. This plan emphasised the cultural,
and potential tourist value that this could
contribute to the urban redevelopment. By
keeping the tribe in this aboriginal cultural
park, not only is the living style of an urban
tribe thus maintained, but also the tradi-
tional indigenous rituals and ceremonies
may provide an authentic experience for visi-
tors interested in indigenous culture. In other
words, there is a potential economic prospect
that the tribe could contribute to the local
redevelopment and so earn its keep. As an
interviewee, Mayaw, stated:
The government initially wanted us to move,
but after we made a counter proposal, they
started considering the possibility of letting us
keep our tribe. In the end, they agreed to let
us to rebuild the tribe in another place.
Mayaw is a middle-aged man who moved to
the tribe along with his father when he was a
child. Spending most of his life here, he is
deeply involved in the life of the tribe, and
had been advocating saving the tribe. To
him, turning the tribe into an aboriginal cul-
tural park was a pragmatic way to maintain
the life of the tribe. Nonetheless, in the end
the tribe was partially relocated because of
security reasons. Since part of the tribe was
demarcated as in danger of flooding, the
households in the lower ground had to be
relocated to an adjacent yet higher ground,
so that the tribe could keep its current func-
tion while not being exposed to the threat of
floods. Even so, this partial relocation was
not accepted without dispute in the tribe.
Since the aboriginal cultural park proposal
included the relocation of the tribe, some
residents, especially the first generation of
urban migrants, were worried about the
impact that relocation would have on the
tribe, and remained reluctant about the
aboriginal cultural park proposal. However,
2898
to the younger generation such as Mayaw,
turning the tribe into an aboriginal cultural
park and the formalising of the informal set-
tlement meant the prospect of a more secure,
long-lasting tribe living in the city, and hence
they eventually persuaded the older genera-
tion. As Mayaw stated:
It’s not just about us. We have to think about
our children. Though it will be a huge change
for us, yet the tribe will live on, and the way of
our life will be passed on.
To the people in the tribe, their primary con-
cern about the aboriginal cultural park pro-
posal is whether the tribe could maintain its
function after the relocation.
Relocating to a designated aboriginal cul-
tural park not only granted the tribe appropri-
ate land use categories, letting them off the
hook of the original relocation plan, but it also
reconnected the tribe with an urban tenant sys-
tem, formalising the informal settlement.
In this sense, turning the Liu-Gong chan-
nel informal settlement into a historic site
and the Xi-Jou tribe into an aboriginal cul-
tural park are both the entrepreneurialisa-
tion of urban informality. Urban informality
was therefore no longer treated as the stum-
bling block of local development, but instead
remade as a token of Taipei’s urbanisation
path, an element of the metropolitan attrac-
tion for further economic development.
Local impacts under entrepreneurialising
informality
Through its entwining with entrepreneurial
thinking, and the mediation of community
planning, urban informality was thus rede-
fined from a housing strategy to a new
urban economic strategy. The unsystematic
building of houses, which was once regarded
as a compromise of a modern urban plan,
has now been reimagined as having cultural
significance to the city. The crooked lanes,
Urban Studies 55(13)
the grungy walls, and the tatty roofs that
mark the informal buildings, are now recog-
nised as momentous features of Taipei. This
unconventional engagement between urban
entrepreneurialism and informality reshaped
the local political reality in the county. To
the local squatters, this engagement decon-
structed the assumed antithesis between
informality and economic development.
Though it spared them from the public
shaming of being unsanitary and economi-
cally unviable, at the same time it re-
enforced a new form of entrepreneurialism
among squatter communities.
In the case of the Liu-Gong channel reno-
vation, since the informal settlement became
a part of the urban redevelopment project,
they had to meet the modern sanitary stan-
dards in order to make the redevelopment
possible. Under the circumstances, though
most parts of the informal settlement contin-
ued to exist, some small detached rooms in
close proximity to the channel were torn
down in order to obtain the necessary space
for constructing a new sewerage system.
This meant that some of the households lost
their storerooms, kitchens or bathrooms in
the renovation project, and had to figure out
a way to readjust these lost facilities into the
space they had kept hold of. In short, this
informal settlement may be able to keep liv-
ing the same place, but the spatial arrange-
ment of their homes and the customs they
developed accordingly all had to be re-habi-
tuated. The impact of entrepreneurialism on
Xi-Jou tribe is more evident. Now that the
tribe had become a part of the indigenous
cultural zone, it could no longer be an
enclosed community. Furthermore, since it
is expected to provide some tourist attrac-
tion to the local redevelopment, it had to be
more open and welcoming to the public.
Unsurprisingly, this transformation has
raised some concerns that the entrepreneur-
ialising of Xi-Jou tribe would erode its exist-
ing way of life. As Mayaw stated:
Chien
To protect this community’s way of living,
they have to stop bothering us with so many
things. They have to stop making all these
rules for the tribe, this is not a zoo! [.] If they
want to make the tribe a tourist spot, fine by
me, but we have to figure out the way to sepa-
rate our private lives to this.
Though the entepreneurialising of the infor-
mal settlement did spare the tribe from dis-
placement, the people in the tribe are still
worried about losing privacy in their new life
in the Aboriginal Cultural Park. Besides
these concerns about privacy, living in the
Aboriginal Cultural Park could also affect
the tribe in terms of household finances. In
its previous form, the tribe lived in an infor-
mal settlement, and the people did not have
to pay rent. Now that the tribe has been
made a part of park, the people have thus
become the tenants of public land, and are
therefore obliged to pay rent for the land
they use. This could create a new financial
burden for people in the tribe, especially
those who are currently unemployed, jeopar-
dising the sustaininability of the tribe.
Therefore, the people also had to develop
new ways to cope with this potential threat
to the tribe. As Mayaw further elaborated:
We will found our own association, establish-
ing a legal person to run the tribe, pay the
rent. [.] Some people will be not able to pay
the rent. So we are thinking about learning to
run some small businesses, something the tribe
could manage together, so that the tribe could
have a mutual fund. That way, if there are
some people in the tribe have difficulties, we
can still maintain our living.
By running the tribe communally, the tribe
is thus able to absorb the impact of rent to
the residents in financial difficulty, keeping
the integrity of the tribe. Under the circum-
stances then, entrepreneurialising of urban
informal settlements is not just a strategic
policy that makes the sustaining of informal
settlements possible, but it has actually
2899
become a process that mobilises the entre-
preneurship of the squatters, making them a
new forming force in the shaping of the
urban redevelopment. During this process,
although squatters have minimised their
chances of being displaced, they have still
had to sacrifice some old ways of living,
adjusting to the new aspects of their lives
that the entrepreneurialisation has brought.
In terms of local government, the entre-
preneurialising of informal settlements not
only made sure that the urban redevelop-
ment could be carried out smoothly, but it
also conveniently spared local government
from directly confronting the squatters, and
the political consequences for the displace-
ment. By making the informal settlements a
part of the redevelopment plan, the local
government was able to shift away its
responsibility for accommodating people,
since the entepreneurialisation of informal
settlements lays particular stress on the
agency of local squatters. Consequently, the
squatters have to demonstrate their cultural
uniqueness and economic value in order to
‘earn’ their privilege to stay, instead of just
having their right to the city. That being the
case, the local government avoided their
responsibility to accommodate these people,
making housing a personal responsibility,
not a public one.
Since this new form of informality is
negotiated through urban entrepreneurial-
ism, it should be thus understood as ‘entre-
preneurialising informality’, which has
redefined the spatial value of informal settle-
ments in terms of their entrepreneurial value
to the urban redevelopment. This entrepre-
neurialising informality, although it may not
be the preferable entrepreneurial plan for
the local government, it has become a new
way to enable urban entrepreneurialism. It
helps entrepreneurialism to negotiate its way
into a city that is dominated by informality,
re-engaging informality with globalised
urban development.
2900
Conclusion
The entrepreneurial city is often treated as
being at odds with urban informality. Since
it often accompanies the introduction of pri-
vate capital and the redevelopment of urban
space, it is usually perceived as a force of
exclusion by local people (Jou et al., 2016).
However, by examining the new discourses
and strategies produced by local squatters,
we can see how local people exhibit their
agency, changing the course of entrepreneur-
ialisation (McFarlane, 2012a). This paper
has shown that entrepreneurial urban policy
mutates and transforms though its encoun-
ter with urban informality. The cases of Xi-
Jou tribe and Liu-Gong informal settlement
demonstrated the unlikely co-evolution
between urban informality and urban entre-
preneurialism. With the mediation of
community-planning system, the residents
actively participated in the transformation
of waterfronts, incorporating themselves
into these entrepreneurial projects, turning
themselves into the cultural attractions of
the city. Entrepreneurialising informality
could therefore be a powerful tool in deli-
neating subaltern urbanism. It stresses the
ways in which urban entrepreneurialism is
mediated, interpreted, and actualised in dif-
ferent political-economic contexts. By mobi-
lising the features of urban informality as
part of the city’s cultural appeal, the squatters
actively took part in the shaping of the urban
regeneration project, turning informal settle-
ments into a cultural asset to the city. In this
sense, the squatters negotiated themselves out
from the immediate threat of displacement.
This narrative of subaltern stresses the agency
of local squatters, moving attention from the
policy end of entrepreneurialism to the local
end, illuminating the way in which entrepre-
neurialism is exercised and lived.
While entrepreneurialising informality
enables new hopes for the squatters, it also
creates new forms of exclusion and
Urban Studies 55(13)
inequality. This co-production of space
between entrepreneurialism and informality
creates new tensions, raises new questions
through this intermeshing process. In the case
of Xi-Jou tribe and Liu-Gong channel reno-
vation, though the informal settlements were
not completely excluded by the local redeve-
lopment plan, they have had to endure
changes in spatial orders and financial
arrangements just to keep their living in the
neighbourhood. Furthermore, although this
entrepreneurialising informality presented
some new possibilities to the local actors,
enabling some squatters to participate in
shaping the urban redevelopment plan, at the
same time it remains a threat to the less
resourceful informal settlements. Since this
entrepreneurialising informality has shifted
almost all responsibility for the housing plan
to the local squatters, it may cause displace-
ment to the squatters that were unable to
make an entrepreneurial plan for their own
informal settlements. Therefore, instead of
seeing entrepreneurialising informality as a
solution for the exclusion of informal settle-
ments in the urban development, it should be
employed as a way to scrutinise the trans-
forming local interactions between globalised
urban entrepreneurialism and local agency.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of
interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for
the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
Note
1. Jing-Yi and another interviewee, Mayaw,
were both the main participants in the local
redevelopment projects. Since they both have
Chien
profound knowledge of the Liu-Gong chan-
nel and Xi-Jou tribe’s redevelopment, this
paper takes many quotes from their words.
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