Speculation about who will stand as candidates in December’s mayoral elections following the mergers and upgrading of the nation’s five special municipalities has recently taken up a great deal of space in the media and has become a focus for public attention.
What is interesting is not who will be serving as mayors, but what effect the establishment of the five special municipalities will have on urban development and the balance between regions.
For President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government, the merger and upgrading of existing cities and counties to form five special municipalities can be seen as an attempt to use budget allocations to influence population distribution and improve regional balance. However, it is unlikely that this attempt will reverse the development trend of increasing concentration in the metropolis of Taipei, and the budget allocation aspect of this policy is insufficient to balance population distribution between different regions.
I analyzed financial allocations for all counties and cities between 1991 and 2005, including budgets for education, science, culture, economic development, social welfare and environmental protection. The figures show that over the 15 years, budgets allocated to education, science and culture were not factors leading to high population concentration.
In other words, when analyzed from a time dimension, population movements are not influenced by government intervention, but have their own underlying patterns. So, no matter which parties control the five municipalities, they will not be able to reverse the trend of people gravitating toward metropolitan Taipei.
Based on this premise, it can be predicted that, despite being upgraded, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung will still face the threat of population flight. Taichung, especially, faces competition from the two big metropolises in the north and south. It will be hard for Taichung to achieve sufficient economies of scale to support infrastructure projects like mass rapid transit.
For Taipei City and Sinbei City (新北市), the upgraded Taipei County, the ever-increasing concentration of people and industry will spur demand for public construction, but with the other three municipalities also vying for resources, living standards in the northern metropolis will fall. Consequently, the mayors of Taipei and Sinbei cities will have tougher jobs than their counterparts in the other three municipalities.
From an urban development perspective, the municipalities, although intended as an intervention to remedy the natural laws of urban development, will result in an overall decline in the quality of Taiwan’s cities.
The solution lies in regional integration. Regional development and construction committees with both expertise and public opinion backing could be set up for northern, central and southern Taiwan to coordinate public construction in the five special municipalities, as well as other cities and counties. This could avoid a situation in which each of the five big municipalities follows its own policies, leading to a waste of resources.
Lai Shih-kung is a professor in the Department of Real Estate and Built Environment at National Taipei University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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