self-presentation to self via others
Saturday afternoon John Friedmann came to The Neighborhood. He was in town for a conference at National Taiwan University, organized by the Department of Architecture and Urban and Rural Studies, which is headed by Hsia Chujoe, a charismatic, controversial figure, world famous in Taiwan, who (full disclosure) sent me to work in The Neighborhood I work in. The person he ordered to first introduce me to The Neighborhood was his MA student, Vivian. She has since graduated, gone out to work in the world for a while, and finally come back to The Neighborhood as their Community Planner. Professor Hsia decided that John Friedmann should also take a look at this neighborhood, and told Vivian to take care of him. Vivian did not seem thrilled with this idea but, as the saying goes, “A teacher for a day, a father for a lifetime.” You’re not exactly going to refuse your advisor’s request; the question of thrilled or not thrilled does not really enter into it. John Friedmann is world famous (in the world) for his World Cities Hypothesis, which I am told still forms the basis for a much of the work on the ramifications of economic globalization for socio-spatial structure (e.g. Saskia Sassen’s Global City work).[1]
About twenty residents had gathered to greet him, some of the core Cultural Association members[2] and some people I didn’t know. They’d fixed an enormous meal which Friedmann did not touch, of course, since he’d just been stuffed with an enormous lunch by the conference organizers. The room was set up with the table right in front of the whiteboard on the wall opposite the door. Friedmann sat in the middle seat facing the door (and the assembled residents); The Professor sat on his left; I sat on his right at the corner of the table; and Vivan sat to my right on the other side of the corner. The Professor suggested that I introduce the neighborhood, but I being more a participant observer than a participant observer, I suggested that it would be better if one of them provided the substance and I provided the translation. The Professor assigned Vivian the job of content providor. She introduced herself in English and then started providing content in Chinese. We were being filmed by the guy who films all our neighborhood events, and there was a little clip-on microphone that Vivian and I kept passing back and forth as we spoke, in the end simply clipping it to the other’s collar as she spoke, since we both kept forgetting to take it.
Vivian spoke in a loud voice and faced outwards, towards the assembled residents; and then I translated in a less loud voice, leaning in to Mr. Friedmann, who had the unagitated movements and the slight impatience of a famous old guy, which is what he is. The Professor took notes and occasionally broke in with his own additions to the story, at first starting out in Taiwanese, out of habit (he is quite politically active), but then remembering that, regardless of how kind everyone is in claiming that I do, actually, know Taiwanese, the chances of an accurate translation to English were extremely low (even though by now I know almost by heart what he is saying).
Vivian started out to the audience:[3] “First I’ll talk about this room that we are in right now, the Shenghuo Guan. I am this community’s community planner, and this was the first case that I took on, was this Shenghuo Guan. This room, which belongs to this building, used to be off-limits. But through the combined efforts of our Cultural Association, the people who live in this building, and my community planning team, the room was opened up to community use. We used a DIY method to convert this old room into a community meeting place and a public space for our community.”
I was going to provide a little vocabulary list for the day’s talk in the footnotes, but as you have probably noticed the footnote situation on this site is less than ideal. One day I will learn to draw cute little blue boxes around my lists, but for now I’m afraid I’m just going to include them in-text, and try to do something clever with the formatting later. (Maybe I’ll pull a little Philosophy of Right and just indent the hell out of it, then put the stuff I don’t like in fonts so small you can barely read them.)
Shenghuo Guan 生活館 life + hall (or other accomodation for public-ish objects or activities, e.g. consulate, museum, gym). If you can think of a translation for this that doesn’t sound bizarre in English, please let me know. There’s another term for Activity Center (活動中心activity-center). A Life-Hall is like an Activity Center but with an elevated sense of purpose.
The Community Planner is supposed to act as both a planner and a mediator between the city government and neighborhood residents; in this sense an area’s Community Planners are in a somewhat tense position vis-à-vis the area’s Lizhang, the borough head (the lowest level of elected official, in charge of one Li, which is anywhere from around 4,000 to around 12,000 people). I’ve been told this tension was the original point of the Community Planning policies: they were initiated by former president Li Tenghui as an alternative power node and voter mobilization method to the Lizhang system. Community Planners are licensed, but not paid, by the city government. A licensed Community Planner can apply for funding for local area improvement projects from the city government (which gets a lot of this funding from the national government). The Community Planner’s position might be summarized by a skeptical snot-nosed academic as an attempt by the state to produce a civil society out of what it sees as a sack of potatoes[5]—or rather, given how nervous city employees are about the diversity of social types and activities in Taipei, a sack of apples and oranges.
Case 案子 anzi a legal case, a police; a plan, a project; files, records. A favorite English term with which to decorate a Chinese sentence, anzi is for some reason invariably translated as case rather than any of the other possibilities, e.g. “I’m now in charge of implementing this very large case,” “I’m sorry, but we’ve got another very important translation case for you to do,” and, my favorite because it comes out of nowhere, “Oh that fight he had with his girlfriend? No they’re fine, that doesn’t matter, it’s just a small case.”[6]
This room…used to be off-limits This neighborhood is made up largely of public housing, which comes in two varieties. The first variety is apartment buildings built by the government, whose apartments are then sold off to private people at reduced (but not exactly what you’d call cheap) rates. There are some restrictions on the initial buyer’s resale rights, but they were quite small to start out with (I think the initial rule was that you had to wait 6 years before you resold it) and have gotten only more minimal since then (it’s now one to two years). Public housing blocks with privately owned units are instructed to set up their own management committees, made up of residents chosen through election, which take care of building cases and collect small monthly management fees, as well as sometimes running small profit-creating ventures like renting out parking spaces or unused portions of the building.
The other kind of public housing is rental, and these are really quite cheap. In 1998, in what I find a rather bizarre attempt to spread the wealth, the Public Housing Department passed a new rule that limited the amount of time one could rent one of these units for to 8 years. Since it hasn’t been eight years yet, they can’t really tell what the results of this. Luckily for them there are not a huge number of such units in the city, because otherwise I suspect there would be much shit hitting their fans come around 2006. A lot of the rental units are rented by single elderly people (who are unlikely to have anyone willing to take care of them); I think (I hope) there may be some reprieve for the elderly. I know people who have spent the last twenty years in the same rental apartments in The Neighborhood; where they are supposed to go now and what will be the benefit to social stability and community consciousness—supposedly big concerns of the city government—are all kind of beyond me.
The Shenghuo Guan is a small first-floor apartment in a public housing buiding with rental units. When the Cultural Association first set its eye on it, it was greeted with denunciations and accusations from the residents’ board of the rental unit building: those people, who have enough money to own their own houses, don’t feel they have enough yet. Now they want to come and take over our housing. It turned out that a relative of the rental unit building management committee had been squatting in this apartment for years. The Cultural Association people, in league with a sympathetic (in both sense of the word) member of the rental unit building, started negotiating with the residents there, and undertook some proactive projects like organizing the (rather soap-operatic, the way my informant tells it) removal of two noodle stands that had been occupying the space in front of the building, thus giving the residents an extra three parking spaces to rent out. Finally, through both negotiation and city government pressure, the squatter was evicted and the room was rented out to the Cultural Assocation for public space use.
Cultural Association A civic association with a charter, open budget, regular meetings, and periodically elected leaders, registered with the city government (Department of Social Welfare or of Civil Affairs, I forget). These started popping up like moles after the end of martial law. This particular Cultural Association is the formalized, legalized descendent of what was originally an ad hoc group convened to protest a particular city government land use and land ownership plan.
DIY Another favorite English jimmy on the Chinese ice cream cone. Individual English letters pronounced in Chinese always take first tone (the high flat one), as when spelling or acronymizing.
“So,” continued Vivian to the audience when I’d finished my translation, “you could say that this room is the community’s first home, it’s our very own public space. But this Shenghuo Guan also has a history: it all starts with our demands for a park, a movement that started six years ago, in 1998. At that time, through the efforts of The Professor, the help of the city government, and the participation of all the people in this room, we embarked on a long protest and compromise with the Taiwan Sugar Corporation. The protest lasted a whole year, but we finally got our public space.”
You could say that this Shenghuo Guan is the community’s first home We could say it, and she does say it; and she’s the first person I’ve heard saying it, giving the phrase somewhat the effect of a christening, or what would be a christening if christening made sense in the Buddhi-Daoist melange that is Taiwanese ritual; all that, of course, presuming that the name takes off and people actually start using it.
Our very own public space Vivian, of course, does not live in this neighborhood. Neither do I. Both she and I consistently use the first person plural possessive when speaking about the neighborhood to people who do live there; but I think we both use the third person plural possessive when talking about the neighborhood to people who do not live there.[7]
Has a history I am sick enough of retelling this history, and you are probably sick enough of rehearing it, that I am not even going to give a semblance of re once again, beyond just recording what Vivian said.
“The park was won through everybody’s cooperation,” Vivian went on, “but then we were faced with the next project.” People nodded their heads. “The three old Taiwan Sugar Corporation storage buildings. As we worked to get the park, we collected more and more information on this area, and we discovered its value. The old storage houses that sit on Taisugar land are very well preserved, and they’re unique in Taiwan. The community wanted to preserve them, reuse them, and turn them into public space benefiting everyone, so we fought to get them declared heritage sites. We fought for three whole years, and finally last year the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs declared all three buildings heritage sites. Since we first came together in 1998, we have had lots of activities. We have an annual community consciousness raising event for children that is now in its seventh year; and of course we just organized our fourth annual Sugar Cane Festival. The festival started in 2000 as a way to promote our efforts to get the park.”
This entry started out as plain old fieldnotes and then somehow of its own accord became fieldnotes for public consumption; but now it seems to be reverting to its original state. Maybe because it just struck midnight. Or maybe it just struck midnight and so I am losing my inspiration for more vocabulary lists. Or maybe she’s now in territory an appropriate vocabulary list for which would require a lot of then-this-happened and then-that-happened storytelling of a kind I really don’t feel like doing right now. Maybe if I just try to get through this part quickly, and you skim a bit, we can get back to a more for-public-consumption sort of atmosphere. But maybe that will also require some sleep on my part. We’ll see what I come up with in the morning.
***more later up above***
[1] Here’s my version of what Sassen is up to (or was up to in the 1990s), from a response paper I wrote to her essay, “The Global City,” in Susan S. Fainstein and Scott Campbell (eds.), Readings in urban theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996[1991]. (You’ll have to excuse the occasional odd prose moment—her style is all like “the convergence of the global reintegrates the discrepancies of the local,” it gets to you after a while).
“Sassen focuses on the increasing mobility of capital and of production facilities, and their increasing removal from nation-based control, has produced an economy that is spatially dispersed in its “activities” (of production and consumption) but ever more tightly centralized in ownership and control. This is a (relatively) concrete example of how spatial organization affects social organization. Dispersal has allowed for a social reorganization of labor-capital relations: as production becomes increasingly mobile and dispersed (combining partial work done by various unorganized people who can be paid poorly—whether in Southeast Asia or in American suburbia), transnational (or at least transregional) firms gain increasing influence in the local economy, while labor loses influence with those firms. The spatial organization of production, consumption, and control are thus the condition of possibility not only for increased profits but for lower wages, and have tended to result in increasing polarization of class, with the majority of jobs earning either very high or very low wages, and with ever fewer jobs in between. Writ large, this polarization means that whereas in the past, high-growth sectors were seen to boost overall national growth, they now increasingly contribute to the impoverishment of other economic sectors, and promote imbalance. Thus dispersion, while homogenizing capital processes, reproduces and increases the differentiation of those who participate in them. Cities, in turn, become even more differentiated from non-central places in terms of the control over the economy that they house; at the same time, the companies whose control is centered in global cities bear little or no responsibility toward the places where they actually perform their activities.”
[3] I was taking notes to facilitate translation (I’ve found this very helpful both to remind myself of what people have said, and to keep myself from spacing out, which is what I usually do when people speak in public, in whatever language), but I was not recording. The stuff in quotation marks here is not actual quotation but a rendering of the gist.
[4] Among other things democratization involved increased explicit interaction between people who were and were not in the employ of state agencies; a rhetoric and some practical moves towards increased everyday-citizen participation in state affairs; a stated ideology of government projects initiated “from the bottom up” that on the one hand reinforces the very hierarchy it is meant to overturn and on the other hand is a perfect example of a state that once tried to encompass all areas of life beating a hasty retreat and handing over a lot of its responsibilities to the private sector; and increased attention by politicians to quality of life and spatial management.
[5] “Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes…. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them…”(The Funny Fulminator, chapter 7 )
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