JAUE2012-075: 'Community empowerment' as an alternative approach toward a creative city? Experiences from Taipei, Taiwan

Abstract

"Creativity" has become one of the most important solutions to fight for the complexity and uncertainty of the global economy. Many related concepts such as creative economy, creative industry, creative class and creative city have become a hot issue in the academic research and empirical studies. However, most studies more concern with the role the importance of creative economy or creative class or creative milieus in the urban development, but ignoring how the transformation of the society influences on the emergence of a creative city. As a result, such studies have been criticized as only related to the neo-liberalism issue, further making social and economic polarization more severe.
In Taiwan, more attention has been paid on 'community' in public affairs, with different programs and numerous initiatives highlighting on 'community' as a site for policy action in the past two decades. Due to the change of social and economic environment, these community-related programs need to review and revaluate. One of the most important policies is the "Community empowerment (CE) programs initiated by the Council for Cultural Affairs since 1994. Thus the purpose of this paper is to evaluate CE programs in Taipei City. Existing literature on CE often focuses on the policy implication or political implication, but less is paid to the process of evolution and learning, as well as a good possibility of CE.
The purpose of this study is to adopt the perspective of the creative city, based on Landry's (2000) writings, to explore how creativity can be embedded in CE and how it can be integrated into the core of urban policies. Different from most studies emphasizing the role of creative industries or creative class in urban development, this study focuses on how to create the environment for enhancing the interactions and the relationships between organizations and individuals. This study suggests that community should be regarded as a R&D site, and CE should be adopted as a strategie action toward a creative city. This paper takes CE programs proposed by the Department of Urban Development of Taipei City Government as a case study, based on a field survey for the 163 projects from 1996-2010.