Expo 2010 Shanghai China recently opened under the full glare of the world’s media. For the duration of this 184-day event, 246 countries and organizations will vie for attention and compete to promote their own interests. By making the city its main theme, Expo 2010 marks the arrival of the urban age.
Statistics show that people living in urban areas constituted more than half the world’s total population in 2007. Every second person now lives in a city, and the trend of global urbanization is unstoppable.
Against this backdrop, one of the biggest challenges facing humankind this century will be solving a wide variety of urban problems and building a people-friendly urban living environment.
By the same token, the way in which we view and manage cities will change as scientific and technological advances are made. For example, the city will no longer be seen as an engineering and architectural construct. Rather, it will be seen as a “living body” belonging to the life sciences.
Solutions must not be restricted to urban design and planning as prescribed by the domains of civil engineering and architecture. Instead, cities need to adopt a far broader view of city management, incorporating governance, administration, planning and legislation.
In particular, space in a city and the activities that take place in that space are so closely interrelated that urban issues such as traffic, land use and housing can no longer can be dealt with independently. Modern problems are best handled through an urban management approach that treats the city as a holistic, complex entity, as that facilitates the effective solution of urban problems and, by extension, sustainable development.
In short, traditional urban planning requires a new paradigm that seeks to re-envision what a city is and develop accompanying methods for managing it.
The question is whether Taiwan is ready for this new era. The government lacks an overall vision for the development of Taiwan’s cities, and it is this that lies behind the merger and upgrading of existing cities and counties to form five special municipalities. At the same time, urban development in Taipei city continues to be restricted by regulations governing floor area incentives in urban renewal buildings. In the face of such developments, I remain extremely concerned that Taiwanese cities will lose their competitiveness.
Lai Shih-kung is a professor in the Department of Real Estate and Built Environment of the College of Public Affairs at National Taipei University.
TRANSLATED BY WU TAIJING
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
The Iran war has exposed a fundamental vulnerability in the global energy system. The escalating confrontation between Iran, Israel and the US has begun to shake international energy markets, largely because Iran is disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway carries roughly one-third of the world’s seaborne oil, making it one of the most strategically sensitive energy corridors in the world. Even the possibility of disruption has triggered sharp volatility in global oil prices. The duration and scope of the conflict remain uncertain, with senior US officials offering contradictory signals about how long military operations might continue.
An article published in the Dec. 12, 1949, edition of the Central Daily News (中央日報) bore a headline with the intimidating phrase: “You Cannot Escape.” The article was about the execution of seven “communist spies,” some say on the basis of forced confessions, at the end of the 713 Penghu Incident. Those were different times, born of political paranoia shortly after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated to Taiwan following defeat in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The phrase was a warning by the KMT regime to the local populace not to challenge its power or threaten national unity. The
RSS