Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for Taipei City Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) yesterday unveiled his urban development policy, proposing to turn the capital city into a metropolis with a sustainable environment and social justice. Su said a good urban development plan was not only about hardware, architecture or space.
“It must cover the living environment, employment, livelihood and development of different industries,” he said. “It is about the long-term balance of the environment. It’s about the past and future of the city and it’s about competing with other international cities.”
Su said Taipei’s urban development contained 10 problems: Poor living quality, mixed residential and commercial areas, inadequate public facilities, unfriendly environment for the physically challenged, unequal allocation of resources for the development of old and new communities, inferior environment of commercial areas, urban planning divorced from reality, indifference to the history and culture of the 400-year-old city, failure to develop each district according to its unique features and lack of resolve in the -promotion of sustainable development.
To address the problems, Su proposed four goals and 10 measures: Establishing a quality living space, forward-looking industrial development, sustainable environment and social justice.
While Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) has also presented an urban development policy and proposed spending NT$1.4 billion (US$43.75 million) on building public housing for cheaper rental fees, Su said he was not interested in engaging in a competition with Hau to see who could write the most bad checks.
Su said only two of the 663 urban development cases over the past 12 years were completed. During his first four-year term, Su said Hau proposed five model urban development areas. However, one was yet to be finished and the remaining four were not even started. Nor did Hau make good on his promise to build cheap public housing, he said.
“That is why Taipei is aging so fast,” Su said. “Although his plan sounds grand, it amounts to nothing but a bounced check if he cannot deliver. I’m the kind of person who makes good on my promises.”
Asked about President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) praise of Hau’s road-fixing plan, Su said he suspected Ma’s vehicle had an exceptional shockproof system so he could not hear the grievances of the general public over the bumpy roads or see the public funds wasted on the constant fixing and digging up of the roads.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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