Taipei City Urban Regeneration Office

Director’s Word
Fang, Ting-An

Chief Engineer, Urban Regeneration Office, Taipei City Government
Chief Secretary, Urban Regeneration Office, Taipei City Government

Urban renewal has become an important tool for cities to enhance its competitiveness as global competition intensified. Hence, we must look at urban renewal from an urban regeneration perspective to increase our capacity. Today Taipei City will refocus its strategy towards public-led urban renewal as its main mechanism to solve its market-led urban renewal problems. Although urban renewal is our office’s (Taipei Urban Regeneration Office) main task, we must look at urban renewal from economic development perspective and we must be creative to foster a balanced urban development environment.

We will choose specific areas to become our demonstration projects while develop its supporting mechanism to efficiently move through every renewal stages. One of the advantages we have is that our public land is spread across the city, and we intend to use them in an enhanced role to catalyze a city-wide regeneration. The outcomes of our public-led urban renewal projects will increase the stock of our public rental housing while provide more infrastructure and facilities to serve the public. As mentioned above, the result of our urban renewal is not limited to spatial, yet we hope these projects will have a lasting impact on our city’s economy and restructuring our industry. Our final goal is to create a high quality of living environment.

In the near future, we will create an urban renewal plan to help transform the city’s old neighborhood. Each neighborhood or region will have its own unique urban redevelopment plan which will integrate to become a city-wide urban regeneration strategy. Furthermore, each neighborhood will utilize its advantage to offer its own unique role in urban regeneration. For example, many old neighborhoods are closely adjacent to Mass Transit Station, and by incorporating Transit-Oriented Development into these renewal projects, it can induce urban renewal in the surrounding area.

Reforming the legal and administrative procedure is also important, as our review system needs to be more efficient. Our review process will become more structured, such as reforming and categorize projects before entering our “Guidelines for the Establishment of the Taipei Urban Renewal and Dispute Resolution Committee”. Hence, cases that are less controversial could be processed together, reducing the waiting time to be reviewed while more complicated case receive more effort and focus to resolve them. Regardless of every reform in our legal and administration process, every ownership right must be respected and protected by the law and its system.

In the long future, we will invest in community development and local action plans. We intend to use community stations as a method to help communication between the public sector and local neighborhoods. In addition, to engage effectively with local residents, we will utilize action plans to help and encourage community involve in the planning process. This is an important building block we must invest, and hopefully this long term engagement experience can help the city government to implement policies that create wining results for both the government and local residents.

I believe that engaging urban renewal with sincerity can help Taipei City government and its resourceful residents create an ideal living future. This is a city that needs to both the private and public to interact with each other and to create a lasting trust to regenerate our future.