The Taipei City Government will not get involved in the urban renewal plans for the area around the Wenmeng Building (文萌樓), Taipei Department of Urban Development Commissioner Lin Jou-min (林洲民) said yesterday, reversing the city government’s previous stance.
Lin had said on taking office in January that the city government should take over the direction of urban development due to the controversy over the inclusion of the former brothel in Taipei’s Datong District (大同).
The future of the site has been shrouded in controversy for years as the owners have sought to expel the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters (COSWAS) from the building, a historic site which formerly served as the headquarters for activists protesting against the criminalization of prostitution.
At a meeting on Monday chaired by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), the city had decided not to get involved in the urban development process because it had discovered that private development plans were already largely settled, Lin said.
City government interference would only drag out the process, he said.
Lin said that Wenmeng Building would be removed from the scope of the private developer’s approved plans.
Following COSWAS protests, the city government had struck the site from the surrounding area’s private urban renewal plan last year, but later reinserted it under a public urban renewal plan.
Its inclusion within the public renewal plan would have allowed the site’s owner to receive a “volume reward” (容積獎勵) under city government rules.
The Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs said that Monday’s meeting had also reaffirmed the building’s status as a historical site and had found that the owner’s maintenance plans were inadequate.
Ko ordered a reassessment of the city’s policy on the Wenmeng Building after the local borough warden called for its status as a historic site to be stripped to smooth the urban renewal plans by allowing for its relocation or demolition.
“After talking about a publicly directed urban development plan for six months we’re now back to the drawing board,” COSWAS secretary Wu Juo-ying (吳若瑩) said.
She said that while the removal of the building from the urban renewal plan was to be welcomed, the city government’s decisionmaking process was opaque.
While the Department of Cultural Affairs had previously said that it hoped to annex the building by trading space in nearby buildings, it was now unclear what future action the department intends to take, she said, reiterating the collective’s call for the city government to appropriate ownership of the building.
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