The Taipei City Government has chosen a plot of land in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口) — originally set aside for building government housing — to be the site for the 2017 Summer Universiade athletes’ village.
Although the plot of land, which covers nearly 16 hectares, has been left undeveloped for more than 30 years, it has not been unused. While one part of it has been made into a sports park, the larger, remaining part has evolved into a lush secondary forest that has become one of Linkou’s characteristic landmarks.
After petitions calling for the land to be reserved for use by local residents and made into an environmental learning center, newspapers recently reported that government departments have responded with the politically motivated proposal to retain the “pleasant” sports park.
However, this proposal ignores the natural woodland that covers the rest of the land, especially the Linkou Yebu Forest, whose planning and maintenance local people have been looking after for the past three years.
The authorities seem determined to repeat the outmoded pattern of reducing nature to dust that has characterized urban development in recent history. This insistence is out of tune both with the “ecologically correct” attitudes often expounded by government departments, and also with claims made by organizations hosting the Universiade that they intend to construct the village with zero net carbon emissions.
It is gratifying to know that the sports park is to be preserved. However, the ecological environment of the whole world, and of Taiwan in particular, is deteriorating daily. It is worrying, then, if the authorities seek only to meet people’s everyday needs, while failing to take a more profound and long-term ecological view.
The idea of “pleasant green spaces” was first proposed as a new concept in urban development by 19th-century English social reformers, who saw them as a way of improving the unhealthy and crowded conditions that were prevalent following the Industrial Revolution. These green spaces emerged in various forms in the town planning of countries around the world for well over a century. This is also true of Taiwan, even if the results are, as yet, not very satisfactory.
However, a still more serious and urgent issue confronts us in the 21st century: The question of how to recover and maintain natural ecosystems.
Not only policies and environmental conditions need to change; changing social and personal attitudes is even more crucial. This task is not confined to suburban woodland; cities themselves are an even more important battleground. As more and more people live together in cities, so cities are the places where action must be taken to awaken social and personal environmental awareness. This is why the Linkou Yebu Forest has such a valuable and significant place in the debate.
The Taipei City Government has recently, and somewhat belatedly, conducted surveys and mapped out trees growing on the proposed athletes’ village site, but at present only larger trees whose trunks exceed a certain diameter have been included in the survey. The diverse plants and saplings growing on the forest floor could well be cleared away and destroyed entirely.
I have been involved in promotion of the Linkou Yebu Forest for three years. As a guide for visitors, I have repeatedly demonstrated to them that woodland it not just an air purifier for the city, nor just an enchanting green backdrop. This secondary forest is a living landscape and self-contained miniature ecosystem. Similar to the confessionals that one finds in Catholic churches, it is a quiet place to reflect on the relationship between people and nature; a learning center that can inspire new thinking about how cities and nature can coexist. The key element is to recognize and experience an ecosystem and resolve to protect it; it is not just a matter of keeping a few trees.
The plot of ground bordering Wunhua First Road (文化一路) and Renai Road (仁愛路) covers five hectares in total. According to existing regulations governing urban planning, building coverage should not exceed 60 percent.
This means that more than two hectares of the plot in Linkou should be set aside,which is just the size of the central area of the Linkou Yebu Forest. Therefore, the athletes’ village can be constructed creatively in a way to meet the requirements of the Building Act (建築法), preserving the forest’s ecological heart.
Let us hope that those concerned will think long and hard about this. If they want to build “diamond-class buildings” whilst avoiding the blame for ruining an existing ecosystem, they should make the best of both worlds by preserving the Linkou Yebu Forest. Such a decision would set a worthy precedent in a world where ecological considerations come increasingly to the fore.
Chen Hsin-fu is a community planner in New Taipei City.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
The ongoing Middle East crisis has reinforced an uncomfortable truth for Taiwan: In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, distant wars rarely remain distant. What began as a regional confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran has evolved into a strategic shock wave reverberating far beyond the Persian Gulf. For Taiwan, the consequences are immediate, material and deeply unsettling. From Taipei’s perspective, the conflict has exposed two vulnerabilities — Taiwan’s dependence on imported energy and the risks created when Washington’s military attention is diverted. Together, they offer a preview of the pressures Taiwan might increasingly face in an era of overlapping geopolitical
RSS