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Paracity: Urban Acupuncture

Marco Casagrande

“Public Spaces Bratislava”

International Conference, Bratislava, November 20, 2014

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First generation city was the human settlement in straight connection with nature and dependent

on nature. The fertile and rich Taipei basin provided a fruitful environment for such a settlement.

The rivers were full of fish and good for transportation and the mountains protected the farmed

plains from the straightest hits of the frequent typhoons.

The second generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism granted the citizens independence

from nature–a mechanical environment could provide everything needed for humans. Nature was

seen as something unnecessary or as something hostile–it was walled away from the mechanical

reality.

Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city. The community gardens of Taipei

are fragments of the third generation urbanism when they exist together with the industrial

surroundings. Local Knowledge is present in the city and this is where Ruin Academy focuses its

research. Among the urban gardeners are the local knowledge professors of Taipei. Third

Generation City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and allows itself to be part of

nature.

The Ruin Academy (Taipei 2010- ) is set to re-think the industrial city and the relationship between

the modern man and nature in the urbanized Taipei Basin. It is looking from the local knowledge

for the seeds of the Third Generation City.

Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. This is the subconscious desire of the industrial

city and the collective trauma of the modern man. Taipei is currently presenting the most advanced

industrial co-existence of a modern city and uncontrollable organic anarchy; nature, including

human nature, is pushing through the industrial surface and turning the city towards the organic

according to a post-human design and ecological sensibility that is consistent with the

environmental politics delineated by Erik Swyngedouw and Gilles Clément. To understand this

force, the reinforced and divided academic disciplines are of no use. Neither is centralized politics

providing any tools. Communication needs to find another way.

Ruin Academy has focused its research on the unofficial life-providing systems within the official

mechanical city. These spontaneous and citizen-generated systems are constantly ruining the

official Taipei. These are systems that are, through punctual interventions, fermenting and

composting the city. From the organic top-soil produced by these composts will emerge the Third

Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city, an organic machine. In Erik Swyngedouw's

terms: "Nature and society are in this way combined to form an urban political ecology, a hybrid, an

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urban cyborg that combines the powers of nature with those of class, gender, and ethnic relations.”

The smelliest parts of unofficial Taipei contain the highest level of energy and life still in

connection with nature; at the same time, the official industrialism aims for a sterile and fully

controlled condition. This brings to mind Andrei Tarkovsky’s maxim in Stalker: “When a tree is

growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's

companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has

hardened will never win.” These urban composts are the corners that are maintaining the essence of

the Local Knowledge, a constructive interaction of nature and human nature in the built human

environment. This local knowledge is suggesting the ways of the ruining processes for Taipei

towards the Third Generation City.

Different disciplines of art and science are meeting in the Ruin Academy following the

multidisciplinary research + design methodology of the Aalto University’s SGT Sustainable Global

Technologies centre. Cross-disciplinary knowledge building has proven vital on the research of the

Third Generation City. Ruin Academy co-operates with the architecture department of the Tamkang

University, sociology department of the National Taiwan University and with the SGT centre of the

Aalto University. Besides these, teams and individuals have been joining the work from various

different backgrounds. Ruin Academy is unofficial, pliant, and weak, in contrast to academic

strength and hardness. The Ruin Academy is a basic shelter for academic squatting, stripped down

from disciplinary focusing and institutional strength. Most important is the connection to the Local

Knowledge, the site-specific wisdom of sustainable human presence in the Taipei Basin. This

knowledge seems to be in straight connection with the collective memory of the First Generation

City, when the built human environment was dependent on nature and dominated by nature. The

Local Knowledge is the driving force for the organic penetrations through the industrial layer of the

Taipei Basin today. Local Knowledge is the force tuning the city towards the organic. Our

communication center is the public sauna on the 5th floor of the Ruin Academy building.

We are looking for the seeds of the Third Generation City:

What are the processes that are ruining the industrial Taipei turning it towards the organic

third generation city?

What are the systems that are bringing life into the modern machine?

What is the life-force / Chi that keeps the city alive and how can this Chi be negotiated with

by means of Urban Acupuncture?

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THE ELEMENTS OF THE THIRD GENERATION TAIPEI

1. Urban Acupuncture

Urban acupuncture is characterized by punctual interventions through the official surface of the city

which aim to establish contact between the urban collective conscious and the life-providing

systems of nature, including human nature. The networks of illegal community gardens and urban

farms of Taipei present a fine example of urban acupuncture. These gardens are the urban

acupuncture needles that manipulate and manifest the collective underlying organic Chi of the

industrial city and turn the mechanical city towards an organic machine. The spontaneous,

unofficial and self-organized community gardens are strong representations of anarchy through

gardening. The collective gardens are reflections of Habermas’ Life World vs. the surrounding city

as the System World.

2. Illegal Architecture

The Instant Taipei is self-made architecture using the official city as a growing platform and energy

source,attaching itself like a parasite in order to leach electricity and water. The illegal architecture

is so widespread and deep rooted as a culture in the Taiwanese cityscape that we could almost speak

about another city on top of the “official” Taipei, a parallel city–or a para-city. This DIY built

human environment is tied directly to human nature and motivated by basic human instinct and

mandated only by desire and availability. Paradoxically, the illegal settlements such as Treasure

Hill are living in a more balanced relationship with the natural environment

3. Urban Nomad

The urban nomad is the antithesis of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, who is numb and absent in the

capital-driven urban surroundings. The urban nomad is on the move, harvesting and trapping in a

city that he views as a landscape wherein seasons and energy concentrations are constantly

changing. The urban nomad can operate alone or in larger camp-like concentrations, such as the

night markets. He is faster and lighter than the official control mechanism of the city, which tries to

prevent him from operating. Besides trading, the urban nomads are also harvesting the city of its

trash and left-over goods for recycling. This hit-and-run unofficial economy is leaching on the

steady material streams of the structural city and is presenting a form of street-level anarchy

through business exchange. A series of activities are on the move or popping up and disappearing in

Taipei, these include the night markets, under-bridge activities, street vendors, spontaneous

karaoke, gambling, puppet theatre, massage, barber, monks, beetle-nut booths, and even moving

gods–all very sensitive to the urban energy flows and hot-spots of urban acupuncture

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4. River Urbanism

Taipei (1G) exists because of the river and the fertile flood plains. The industrial city (2G)

claimed independence from nature and turned the river into an industrial sewage site. A

reinforced concrete wall 12 meters high was constructed in-between the built human

environment and the river nature. Third Generation City aims to reuninite the river and city

through the natural restoration of the river environment. The river shall run as an ecological

corridor through a city that is pulsating together with its hydraulics. The city will be re-

developed from the view point of the river. Local knowledge still remembers the time when the

water of the rivers was drinkable and people washed themselves in the rivers. Every family had

a rowing boat and the river was full of harvest. This is still a living memory for some in Taipei,

but for the industrial generations the river has become a fiction.

The Phoenix bird has not yet come and the River has not yet revealed its divine nature: this is the

end of me. - Confucius

5. Ultra-Ruin

Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. The ruining processes of Taipei are keeping the

city alive. A weed will root into a crack in the asphalt and eventually ruin the city. The crack is the

acupuncture point and the weed is the needle. The mechanical surface of Taipei is dotted with ruins

and holes reflecting a larger vision of an organic machine, the organic ruin of the industrial city.

People are constantly ruining the totalitarian control architecture of the industrial mind, which they

subconsciously feel as a threat to the human nature. To understand the dynamics of the ruining

processes of a city is essential for the growing of the Third Generation built human environment.

Treasure Hill is a high-density ruin, a fragment of the Third Generation City. In the settlement, the

same space is shared by people and jungle and the complex three-dimensional power balances

between the different species, including humans, is delicately changing day by day. Treasure Hill

also lives on a flood bank and does not view the river as a threat. It is inhabited by urban nomads

who are harvesting the surrounding city. The whole settlement is an urban acupuncture needle for

Taipei.

Local knowledge is an element that is pushing through all the layers of the 3G City, a connection

between the modern man and nature. Following Fritz Lang in Metropolis: “The mediator between

the head and the hands must be the heart.” Local knowledge is the mediator that is tying the Third

Generation citizen with nature and which operates as the subconscious natural agent on the

collective conscious of the civilized man.

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CASE 1: TAIPEI ORGANIC ACUPUNCTURE

Acupuncture is the procedure of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the

body to relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes.

Urban planning integrates land use planning and transportation planning to improve the built,

economic and social environments of communities.

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in

particular the shaping and uses of urban public space.

Environmental art is art dealing with ecological issues possibly in a political, historical, or social

context.

Sociology is a science of human social activity.

Anarchy is acting without waiting for instructions or official permission. The root of anarchism is

the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this.

The community gardens and urban farms of Taipei are astonishing. They pop up like mushrooms on

the degenerated, neglected, or sleeping areas of the city, which could be referred to as urban

composts.

These areas are operating outside the official urban control or the economic standard mechanisms.

They are voids in the urban structure that suck in ad-hoc community actions and present a platform

for anarchy through gardening.

For the vitality of Taipei, the networks of the anarchist gardens seem to provide a positive social

disorder; positive terrorism. They are turning the industrial city towards the organic, towards

accident, and in this sense they are ruining the modern urbanism. They are punctual organic

revolutions and the seeds of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city.

1.1. CORNERS ARE WINDY

Claude Lévi-Strauss believed in the beauty of the human nature as part of nature. Max Horkheimer

and Theodor Adorno lost all the hope for industrial development and said it has failed the promise

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of the Enlightenment - it had corrupted humanity. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Mosfilm, 1979)

takes sophisticated people into the Zone, where their deepest wishes may come true. The Zone is

the organic ruin mirroring the surrounding mechanical reality. For the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady

& Boris) the Zone was a Roadside Picnic.

The community gardens of Taipei are Roadside Picnic. Grandmothers can take us there, like

Stalker. The honorable Lévi-Strauss could be happy to start new ethnographical research between

the parallel realities of the cultures of the urban compost gardens and the surrounding city–the

reversed modernization and focusing in Local Knowledge. Horkheimer's & Adorno’s graves should

be moved to one of these urban acupuncture spots of Taipei. Here even they would find hope,

surrounded by the valueless modernity and hard industrialism. Prof. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

(Helsinki University Arabic Studies) has said: “The valueless void of the society of today will be

filled with ethics: the corners are windy.” With the recognition of the urban farms and community

gardens, Taipei has found its corners.

What is the ethics then pushing through these corners into the city? It could be called Local

Knowledge, site-specific reactions building a bridge between the modern man and nature. The

gardens of Taipei, these acupuncture points, are penetrating through the industrial surface of the city

and reaching the original ground. The self-organized community gardens are the urban acupuncture

needles of Taipei. Local Knowledge is in connection with the first generation city, when the built

human environment was dependent on nature and regulated by nature. Now the anarchist gardeners

are regulating the industrial city.

1.2. DOMINATE THE NO-MAN’S LAND

The community gardens are taking over abandoned construction sites and ruined housing areas,

empty city-blocks waiting for development, flood banks of the rivers, and even graveyards out of

fashion. In many cases, the gardens are flourishing on spots of land where the landowner issues are

unsettled or complicated. Sometimes, the garden will stay in the spot for only a couple of years, as

in the cases of areas soon to be developed; sometimes, the urban farming has decades-long

traditions as with the river flood plains or on the island in-between Zhongxiao and Zhongshing

bridges. The smaller urban farms are flexible and eager to overtake the empty spots of the city,

eager to dominate the no-man’s land.

One of the more famous urban farming communities of Taipei was the Treasure Hill settlement,

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originally an illegal community of KMT veterans. During its legitimating process, Treasure Hill

became so famous that eventually the original community was kicked away by the city government

and the houses were taken over by artists and art-related organizations. All the farms were

destroyed in the process. Sounds like urban warfare against urban acupuncture. Treasure Hill was

powerful and self-sustained when it was illegal. The community built its own houses and its own

farms and it made its own rules. The official city wanted to eliminate this unofficial organic rival.

NGOs found the issue sexy and stepped in to protect and legitimize the settlement. In the end, the

NGOs and artists took over the now-famous community and hooked up with the city government.

The original urban farmers didn’t fit the picture anymore and had to leave. Now you can listen to

rap-music in a yellow plastic tent where the gardens used to be. Local knowledge died.

But Treasure Hill is not alone. Urban farming happens through different social classes and

throughout the city. The socially disordered citizens are ready to occupy land and start the

community farms over and over again. Some acupuncture spots get hot and benefit the surrounding

urban tissue while others fade away. The industrial surface of the city keeps constantly being

broken up and herbs and vegetables are planted into the cracks. People are ruining the industrial

city. That this exchange operates according to barter principles renders the performance work

consistent with the vision of the ecological economy described by Clément in “The Emergent

Alternative”:

Perhaps it is time to think about what will, almost mechanically, best accommodate an

ecological regime for the planet. Asking what form tomorrow's currency would take is not

asking which currency will dominate (the dollar, the euro, the yen, the euro-yen!) but rather

it involves asking ‘what philosophy of exchange and sharing is required for the survival of

humanity on this planet?’

1.3. URBAN EDITORS

Compared to Western cities, Taipei plays according to quite different rules. The aesthetics of the

city is dominated by the functionality of a big collective machine and the urban mechanism is

constantly being edited and rendered as with changing the micro-chips or other parts of a super-

computer into more powerful ones. The urban data is people and this is what the machine needs to

process. Mostly, it goes smoothly, but also people get viruses–they get together in spontaneous

demonstrations, they do tai-chi in improvised city-corners, they launch ad-hoc night markets or

under-bridge sales on temporarily occupied streets or city corners. And they make farms–they are

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squeezing organic material into the machine like a creeper crawling into an air-conditioning box.

Why they do this? Why does nature want to break the machine?

Developers are the true urban editors. They are linked with the city authorities and necessary

political powers and they make the urban editing. Architects are in a secondary role–something like

the hyenas after the lions have made the kill. Money is a good consultant and the generating force

of the developer-run urban editing process. This is not urban acupuncture though; it is more like a

Western style medical practice–operations on the body removing, changing, or maintaining parts–or

even plastic surgery. (Oh, Shanghai has bigger tits than Taipei.) From the perspective of developers

and architects, the body is not necessarily seen as one big organism.

In this rough editing process, the anarchist gardeners seem to act as micro-editors–parasites

benefiting from the slow circles of the big-scale development. They occupy the not-so-sexy areas of

the city and jump in the more sleepy parts of the development cycle. For example, the developer

buys a whole city block with originally many land-owners. The process is slow because he has to

negotiate with all of them. While the process is dragging behind, the urban farmers step in and start

farming the area. The developer doesn’t want to cause any more fuss and lets it happen. It takes

three to five years before the developer has got all the area to his possession and throughout those

same years the site acts as the community garden. When the actual construction starts, the gardeners

have already occupied a next vacant spot in the city.

CASE 2: ILLEGAL ARCHITECTURE

Taipei is Open Form. Citizen design reactions communicating with each other and trying to

dominate the no-man’s land like different plants in the jungle. Hsieh takes his commands from the

jungle. So does the Taiwanese citizen build illegal architecture. This architecture uses the “official”

city as a growing platform and energy source, where to attach itself like a parasite and from where

to leach the electricity and water. The layer of illegal architecture combined with other citizen-

activated spontaneous community reactions, such as the illegal urban farms or night markets, is so

widespread and deep rooted in the Taiwanese culture and cityscape that we could almost speak of

another city on top of the “official” Taipei, a parallel city–or a para-city: Instant Taipei.

2.1. ORCHID ARCHITECTURE

Illegal architecture is Weak Architecture. One tries to achieve the maximum effect with minimal

effort. This architecture is as sharp as it is lazy. This parasite architecture has personality and nature

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and it can disappear as fast as it has blossomed–like an orchid. The official, stiff, hard, and boring

Taipei is blossoming with Orchid Architecture. The illegal citizen activities are keeping the city

alive; they are ruining the faceless industrial city and pushing in the organic.

Illegal architecture comes in many forms. You have the horizontal and vertical illegal extensions of

the apartment buildings, illegal houses and illegal communities such as Treasure Hill or the Amis

aboriginals’ urban village by the Xindian River, pigeon houses, beetle-nut booths, temples, and

even moving architecture like the Taiwanese street-style operas or night-market booths. The point is

that this fruitful culture of self-made architecture has only been illegal as long as the “official” city

has been in the picture. These flexible, moving, adjustable, and pliant forms of urban nomad

structures have always been. Official city is the newcomer. Illegal architecture is a new name for

the citizen’s right to express himself through architecture. These guys don’t need architects, they are

the architects. They are more resourceful and creative that the “official” architects corrupted by

university teaching, the building industry, and laws and codes of construction.

Official city wants to get rid of anything spontaneous coming straight from the human nature. This

means “illegal” architecture, “illegal settlements,” and “illegal” gardens in the urban stage instead

of self-made homes, communities, and urban agriculture. The industrial city is a machine designed

to regulate human life. Illegal architecture is closer to nature, including human nature, and as such

against any kind of life control.

Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-Chun calls his style People’s Architecture. Basically, this means

giving power back to people to build their homes and to self-arrange their communities. This is

needed in the countryside but also especially in the industrial city. Hsieh wants people learn again

to tune their built human environment to the natural conditions, hook up to the site-specific Local

Knowledge, and experience the architectural landscape through physical labor.

Hsieh wants people to regulate their own built human environment out of official control. Before

industrialism and before modernism this was normal. Now the official city wants to “beatify” the

streets from humane architecture, to cut off the aura of the self-organized, built human environment,

which has become a human error in the official data.

2.2. INSTANT TAIPEI

Taipei should be careful with its steps towards a “beautified” future. If the official beauty means

killing the self-regulated urban communities, destroying the urban farms and community gardens,

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cleaning the roof-tops out of pigeon houses and illegal architecture, and forbidding people to: swim,

barbeque, walk a dog, step on grass, chew beetle-nuts, fly kites, fish, set up street vending, karaoke,

gamble, pick flowers, sleep, and organize picnics... what is left? Beautified official boredom with a

polluted river.

Instant Taipei happens when there is air to move and space where human nature can endlessly

construct and deconstruct like ants in human scale. The official city can happen simultaneously

together with the Instant Taipei and the official city should accept this as something really beautiful.

Let the city rot, ferment, and compost itself. Recognize the illegal insect architecture as the true

force of Taiwanese built human environment.

CASE 3: TAIPEI FROM THE RIVER

Taipei is here because of the river. The clear, drinkable water of the Keelong, Danshui, and Xindian

Rivers is still in the living memory of the communities along the rivers. For these people and for

Taipei, the rivers have been the everyday source of life. This goes back to the time before the flood

walls and time before the city was separated from its natural environment. The city has not yet

become a total industrial fiction, Taipei still carries the river in its collective memory.. But new

memories need to be made, and fast. The rivers must become again the lifeline and nerve system of

the urbanized Taipei Basin. A new kind of urbanism must be created that is sensitive enough to use

this nerve system living in straight dialog with the river nature; landscape urbanism from the

viewpoint of the river: Taipei River Urbanism.

3.1. LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

The Jiantai fishermen have been operating on the Keelong and Danshui Rivers for generations,

fishing, crabbing, and transporting cargo and people on the rivers. They used to carry their Local

God with his temple to higher grounds from the harbor when the river was flooding. The river was

so clean that they could drink the water. Floods came every year, the boat building master told us,

but it was not so bad since there was no flood walls: the water had plenty of space to spread around.

He showed the level below his knee where the water used to rise during the typhoon.

Then, one time, the dictator’s home was flooded. He tells us referring to Chiang Kai-Shek. The

dictator got mad at the forces of nature and buildt the walls. The Jiantai fishermen remained with

their shrinking settlement close to the river, while the mad dictator remained with his city, walled

up from the river. Still today, the fishermen don’t find a reason why the walls were built.

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“The Japanese had better ideas for the rivers. They for example thought of digging the Keelong

River deeper. When KMT came the river got polluted and then came the wall.” – An old fisherman

of the Jiantai community. (Interview, March 2011)

Missis Chen has been living together with the Xindian River all her life. She and her husband used

to work for a construction company that harvested sand from the river bottom. Missis Chen

participated in the work and she also cooked tea for the working men. These working men founded

the Treasure Hill community together with the KMT veterans pulling back from Mainland China.

The illegal community by the river built their own houses and farmed all the flood plain from

Treasure Hill to the river. The water was so clear that on low water they could walk to the other side

of the river because they could see all the time the bottom and where to step. Children used to cross

the river on top of buffaloes. All the families also had to have a boat, according to Missis Chen, to

visit their relatives and to go to markets to sell their vegetables. “Sometimes, an uncle was so drunk

that we didn’t know how to send him home in the dark to the other side of the river with his little

boat.”

Because of the flood, the Treasure Hill settlers did not build valuable properties on the flood area

down the hill, but instead used that area for secondary buildings such as pig houses and storages.

The government, however, wanted to “protect” them and bulldozed the houses away, in the end

forbiding them from farming on the fertile flood plains that were zoned for parks for industrial

aliens.

“The pollution comes from up stream.” Missis Chen says. Suddenly, the river got so dirty that they

could not eat the fish anymore. “Even the dogs don’t eat the fish today.” Before the pollution, they

drank the river water, washed their children, clothes, and vegetables in the river, and ate the fish and

crabs. The river was the source of their everyday life. (Interview, March 2011)

The Amis aboriginal tribe spokesman of the Xi Zhou village is a representative of a very brave

riverside community. The descendants of the original three families from the Taidong Amis

community have been fighting for their rights to live along the river. First, the government

destroyed their riverside farms and buildt a bicycle track instead. It was the same pattern as with

Treasure Hill: controlled nature as amusement park for controlled urban citizens is better than living

from urban nature supporting uncontrollable urban natives, urban nomads.

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Then, the officials tried to kick the Amis from their homes and “resettle” them, as they did with

theoriginal Treasure Hill community. The Amis refused and have been fighting back ever since.

Now, they are in a dialog with the government, who has proposed to move the village a bit further

from the river and build to them new homes in apartment buildings. The Amis think that the

government houses will be nothing compared to their self built homes that form a unique organic

community that is as much a garden as it is architecture. The Amis prefer to build their new homes

by themselves too in the same organic way as the community is built now and keeping the same

dialog with the neighbors and collective spaces.

The Spokesman is 37-years-old and tells us that he spent all his childhood with the river, who

provided the community its everyday food. The collective farming along the river was as essential

to the community sense as the river itself and those two cannot be separated in the Spokesman’s

childhood memory. Then: the river got polluted. (Interview, March 2011)

3.2. OFFICIAL MISTAKE

The Official aims in coming in between human and nature; also in between human and human

nature. The official city is modern and inhumane. It wants to clean up the back-alleys of Taipei and

beautify them. The official sees the natural as chaos and control as the savior.

It prevents people from farming on the river banks. In fact, it forbids any kind of plantations on the

river banks, because they belong to the flood protection area. Missis Chen has been farming all her

life on the Xindian River flood plains. So have the Amis settlers. For them, the flood is natural and

they kept on farming until the government came to “protect” them, as the school head-master came

to protect naughty Alex “from himself” (Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange). In official point of

view, when a human gets close to nature, including human nature, he approaches danger. He can get

out of control. As Horkheimer and Adorno write about the control mechanisms of the civilized

society: “The hate that is nesting inside of it against all irregularity is constantly ready to be leashed

against those minorities that are closer to nature in its social margins.”

The river can get out of control–at least out of human control. It is almost as if it supposed not to be

controlled by human. The industrial city is the ultimate manifestation of human control, a

machinery to regulate human life. This machine and the hydraulics of nature seem to be in some

sort of conflict, trying violently to fit together in the same Taipei Basin.

The river is flooding, which is something that the city doesn’t want, and the city is polluting, which

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is something that the river doesn’t want. An easy, almost fast-food solution was to build a wall

between the city and the river. The flood and the rest of the water is supposed to stay on the other,

“organic / illegal” side of the city-river coexistence. The wall also keeps the stinky and polluted

water out of sight, out of mind.

The wall has been up already a few generations since the 1960s. For the young Taipei citizens, the

river hardly exists; nature has become a fiction. Now, the Taipei City Government Department of

Urban Development has admitted that building the wall and polluting the river has been “kind of an

official mistake” (meeting and dialog, Ruin Academy–DUD, March 2011) and tries to find

strategies to make this up for the citizens. They build bicycle ways to the river banks and paint

official beautified graffiti on the wall. Neat riverside parks are being created and citizens are

encouraged to cherish the “blue highway.” At the same time, the citizens are not allowed to create

spontaneous community farms along the rivers and the wall has not moved anywhere. The river is

allowed to exist only under official control and the citizens are only allowed to be with the river

under the same official control.

Taiwanese nature, as any nature, is against any kind of control. The only rule of nature is existence

maximum, to produce maximal life in the given conditions. This goes for the jungle and this goes

for the human communities in the Taipei Basin. Organic / illegal human settlements can find a way

to coexist with the rest of the nature in contrast with the official alienation. This has been the reality

in Taipei also before the hyper-industrialism that begun in the 1950s.

With the industrial-economic growth, the co-existence with nature has been forgotten and the

people and communities living along the environment are seen as non-hygienic minorities that need

to be regulated, “saved from themselves.” Now that the environmental consciousness has become

an “international trend,” Taipei has also come to realize that it is actually a river city.

The big question with this urban ecological awakening is whether urban nature (river, mountains,

jungle, human nature, wetlands…) will continue to be seen as an almost virtual quasi-ecological

amusement park, or whether the official Taipei will accept nature to be real. Can the river be real

and the citizens allowed to do real things with real nature? Is a grandmother allowed to establish a

vegetable garden along the river and take clean water from the stream? (The river flow is owned by

the Central Government. The South-East banks of the rivers belong to Taipei City Government and

the other banks to New Taipei City–formally Taipei County. Within the Taipei City Government,

the river banks are controlled by the River Department, Park Department, Department of

Hydraulics, Department of Urban Planning, and Department of Urban Development.)

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3.3. PARTICIPATORY PLANNING

A lot of water needs to go through a city in order to keep it alive. In Taipei, it goes like this:

1. Fresh water from the mountains is collected in the sweet-water reservoirs of Wulai and Taoyuen

from where it is directed to the purification plants in a couple of points around the city. From these

water centers, the drinking water is the directed to the households and other water consumer units.

(Interview and tour, March 2011)

2. After consumption, dirty water, including sewage and grey water, is collected in the Dihua,

Neihu, and Bali sewage treatment plants from where the clean water is again released either to the

rivers or into the Taiwan Strait.

Officially 63% of the Taipei Basin is connected to the sewage treatment system. The remaining

37% is still released straight into the rivers. These are “official numbers,” the un-official, real

volume of river pollution is higher. According to the Manager of the Dihua sewage treatment plant

“there are a lot of small factories in the mountains who release their pollution to the rivers at

nights.” (Interview in Dihua Sewage Plant, March 2011)

The natural river restoration in Taipei’s urban conditions requires new kind of socio-ecological

knowledge-building and decision-making. The different river-related departments of the city

government (river, hydraulic, environmental protection, urban development, urban design, public

works, etc.) admit that they are lacking cross-disciplinary co-operation and that they don’t see any

participatory planning around the urban river restoration issue, but that they want this. They want to

get out from their corners and also give space for the other departments to come to their territories.

They want to co-operate, but the problem remains: every corner has a king.

These kings lay down the disciplines and official power hierarchies that cannot tolerate any changes

and that feel every spontaneous move as a threat. These kings make sure their officials protect their

territories against the other department. “No, you cannot plant anything here: the river banks belong

to the river department.” The river is flowing in-between a good handful of different departments of

Taipei City and Taipei New City and the Central Government fighting for their rights to control the

different aspects of nature. Meanwhile: nothing happens, the river is polluted because of

bureaucracy. The pollution comes from up-stream.

16

A boat should be set up in the middle of the Danshui River.t. A new Noah’s Ark where the

representatives of the shareholders of the river would gather for participatory planning. Aside from

the different city, county, and central government officials, there would be scholars, scientists,

journalists, NGOs, and representatives of the Local Knowledge. Missis Chen would be there, the

Jiantai fishermen, and the Amis.

This participatory planning could lead into decision making concerning the natural river restoration

and the reunion between the city and the river. Maybe the participatory planning would be chaired

by the United Nations? The UN-HABITAT is looking for urban river cases that could be used as

examples for other similar kind of cases around the world. Taipei could lead the way. Cleaning the

river and creating sustainable River Urbanism is not a technological question, it is a question of

communication, sensitivity, and participatory planning.

3.4. FIVE ELEMENTS

The Taipei River Urbanism will be cooked up with five elements: Local Knowledge, Collective

Ownership, Environmental Technology, Natural River Restoration, and Architecture.

Local Knowledge anchors the future Taipei sustainable development to the real memories and site-

specific knowledge of living together with the river nature.

Urban farming and community gardens have always existed together with the river. This Taiwanese

phenomenon should be encouraged as a vital part of the River Urbanism. The gardens can be

connected to more complex systems of citizen-initiated constructions and even alternative

communities along the rivers following the examples of the Amis and the Treasure Hill.

Fishing, crabbing, and aquaculture will restart automatically after the water quality reaches an

acceptable level, as will boating, swimming, and other physical activities within the rivers.

Collective Ownership binds the citizens to the restoration process by taking them into the

development as shareholders. The ownership sense is critical to the reunion of the city and the river.

If the citizens do not feel as though they are shareholders of the future river nature, the city will

remain behind the wall and the river will remain as a drive-in amusement park.

Environmental Technology will provide solutions for various sectors of the River Urbanism with

sustainable energy production, pollution control and treatment, and flood management.

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Different sustainable energy solutions will be examined in the river corridors. Small-scale wind

energy can power local installations such as community gardens and alternative communities. Tidal

energy can be an alternative in the river mouth area where the tidal pulse effects the river all the

way to Zhuwei-Guandu. Fast growing bio-mass can be grown on the river banks and harvested from

boats to fuel bio-energy plants in selected locations. The Taipei climate and the fertile river banks

are optimal for bio-mass cultivation. The biomass and tidal energy must be tuned together with the

free-flooding plan. Too-fast steps may increase the flood level while the flood walls still exist. Solar

energy can be produced also on floating installations.

Environmental technology will increase the effectiveness of the existing sewage treatment plants

and help take care of the remaining sources of pollution. Local purification installations and dry

toilet systems can be offered to the areas still out of the sewage grid.

Natural River Restoration will apply the existing knowledge of river restoration, but in urban

conditions. The River Restoration is based on free flooding, and this will eventually mean the

removal of the flood walls after the community-scale flood control infrastructure is completed in

Taipei.

The sedimentation pollution will be removed from the river bottoms and treated. The river bank soil

will be either removed or treated or the pollutants will be tied into vegetation as, for example, part

of the biomass production. Wetland areas will be introduced together with riverbank vegetation and

eventually connected to the mountain jungles as green corridors in order to increase biodiversity

and to treat the water and soil.

Probably the most challenging part of the natural river restoration will be the element of free

flooding. Community-scale underground storm water reservoirs can be built in the flood areas of

the Taipei Basin as with the Tokyo underground typhoon reservoir mega-structures, but as a de-

centralized system. After the underground storm water capacity is functional, the flood-walls will

be removed; the city and river will be reunited.

Architecture will still define the human built environment of the Taipei River Urbanism, but in

closer connection with the organic growth and the water movement. The Local Knowledge will

provide solutions for organic construction, flexibility, and community sense.

The free flooding will present new challenges for housing and infrastructure where the static and

18

industrially-built architecture has to give up in order to let nature to step in. The urban

environmental conditions will not be aimed to be fixed and controlled, but flexible and Open Form.

Taipei and Taiwan has a high standard of illegal, citizen-built architecture. This spontaneous culture

or gardening and building should be encouraged and supported. The River Urbanism will step back

from the developer- or official-initiated construction and make more room for citizen architecture.

The DIY architecture can start in small scale on the river banks as part of the community gardens

and it can also start building mediating areas over the flood wall connecting the city to the organic

side.

3.5. URBAN ECOPUNCTURE

Building up the concrete wall was easy, but demolishing it seems to be a big challenge. The city

inside the wall has been built without much consideration for the natural environment. Actually,

nature is seen as something hostile for this fragile, man-made machinery. With River Urbanism, our

challenge is to turn this machine into an organic machine. We already have the great hydrological

machine of the pulsating river nature inside us. Somehow, the city needs to find a way to pulsate

together with it.

I propose two possible ways for how to start development toward the Taipei River City. The first

one introduces a methodology for how to punctually clean the city from inside and how to open up

the city toward the rivers from the inside. We call this Urban Ecopuncture. The other example is

the possible case of Guandu as an example of a river city.

Opening up the covered rivers, streams, and channels will give a possibility for Urban Ecopuncture,

cleaning the city from inside. The opened up waterways could act as biological filters purifying the

water originating from the polluted rivers. The communities around these Urban Ecopuncture areas

would receive, treat, and recycle the waste from the surrounding city, acting as eco-valleys within

the urban fabric. The eco-valleys would contain the needed environmental technology to take care

of its share of inputs from the surrounding city. The eco-valley areas would also have the first

underground storm-water reservoirs and act as flood relief for the surrounding city as an urban

sponge.

The design methodology of Urban Ecopuncture is developed in co-operation between Finnish

EPEC and Casagrande Laboratory taking the eco-city principles of Professor Eero Paloheimo into

the hearts of existing cities with ecological challenges.

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The Leo-Gong channel could be the first one of the Taipei eco-valleys. Through its length we

would biologically purify the water originating from the Xindian River and then use the clean water

as the center of the new ecological environment. We could have a beach inside the city. New

housing would exist together with the old communities and facilitate the needed environmental

technology solutions for the waste treatment and energy production for the surrounding city.

Under the Leo-Gong Eco-Valley could be the underground storm water reservoirs acting as the

urban sponge. Biomass production and urban farming would exist around the channel, benefitting

the city’s micro climate. The development of the Leo-Gong Eco-Valley should be done through

participatory planning with local knowledge.

Another possibility for the first approach toward the river urbanism would be in the possible case of

developing the Guandu flood plain area, in which case we would talk more of a newly developed

River City rather that urban restoration through the eco-valleys. In our previous research, through

the design-process we examined the possibilities of inhabiting a 150,000 resident eco-city in

Guandu. The basic character of this solution was to move the dividing highway into a tunnel in

order to unite the now-divided ecological area and to build a man-made river taking most of its

current from the Keelong River. This 7.2 kilometer new river would act as the biological filter

purifying the water for the infrastructure use of the new Guandu River City.

The whole urban design is based on free flooding. The digging of the highway tunnel and the new

river would provide enough soil for sculpting island-platforms for the new architecture that would

survive also in the high water conditions. Some architecture would be floating and some would

stand on stilts. The fertile flood plain would be used for bio-mass production as a resource for bio-

energy. This bio-energy agriculture could then spread further into the Danshui and Keelong Rivers

flood plains. Besides bio-mass production, the Gaundu River City would encourage urban farming

and community gardening in all scales and also in such a way that it is integrated into buildings. All

in all, Guandu would be an eco-city living on the principles of free flooding, producing energy and

food, and treating its own waste. The green area would still keep its positive impact to the Taipei

micro-climate.

3.6. TAIWANESE SOLUTION

The natural river restoration and taking the city back to the river is not a mystery. This is in the

minds of the Taipei City Government and the Central Government. There is the will and the

20

technology exists. Normal people feel a bit lost though. For them, how the city operates and what

has happened to the rivers seems to be out touch. They have not been part of the narrative of the

city before and they find it hard to develop tools to negotiate with the official side of the

community. Participatory planning will offer the tool for the Local Knowledge to be part of the

decision making and the Knowledge Building of the Taipei River Urbanism.

The ecological restoration of the urbanized Taipei Basin must be a local Taiwanese solution, not a

copy from Tokyo or a European city. The river city Taipei must remain unique and local. The urban

solutions in Taipei will probably be a bit messier than Tokyo, but so is the jungle. The big

ecological restoration process will be broken up into networks of local community-scale solutions,

such as the underground storm water tanks or river-side community gardens. Partners for

environmental technology, futures research and participatory planning can found from Finland or

elsewhere in Europe, maybe Japan can play a role too.

Taipei Basin is an urbanized flood plain and water system with 7 million inhabitants and dramatic

hydrological conditions. The human impact to the water system is dramatic as well. The river is not

providing sweat water to the city, nor is the fishes, clamps or shrimp eatable because of the

pollution. The fertile river banks are not used for farming or gardening. In-between people and the

rivers is a 10 meters high reinforced concrete wall. For the city the organic river has become an

alien and people have been directed to live in a mechanical reality apart from nature. Quoting the

leading hydrological consult of Taipei City, when asked about the dual reality of

mechanical/organic Taipei and what could be done: “Nothing. Live with it.” (Meeting with the

Taipei City Government Secretary General and representatives 3.12.2012)

CASE 4: PARACITY

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

- Samuel Beckett

Paracity is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-

build actions generating spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built

human environment and this organic constructivist dialog leading into self-organized community

structures, development and knowledge building.

The growing organism the Paracity is based on a three dimensional wooden primary

structure, organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6 meters constructed out of CLT cross-

21

laminated timber sticks. This simple structure can be modified and grown by the community

members working as teams or by an assigned Paracity constructor.

The primary structure can grow even on neglected urban areas, such as river flood plains,

hillsides, abandoned industrial areas, storm water channels or slums. Paracity suites perfectly to

flooding and tsunami risk areas and the CLT primary structure has a high standard of earthquake

performance.

People will attach their individual self-made architectural solutions, gardens and farms on

the primary structure, which offers a three dimensional building grid for the DIY architecture.

Primary structure offers the main arteries of water and human circulation, but the finer local

knowledge nervous networks are grown by the inhabitants. Large parts of the Paracity is occupied

by wild and cultivated nature.

Paracity’s self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid environmental

technology solutions providing methods for water purification, energy production, organic waste

treatment, waste water purification and sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be

adjusted according to the growth of the Paracity and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not

only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leaching waste from its host city

becoming a positive urban parasite following the similar kind of symbiosis as in-between slums and

the surrounding city. In a sense Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial

city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction. Paracity is a third generation city, an

organic machine, urban compost, which is helping the industrial city to transform into being part of

nature.

4.1. PARACITY / TAIPEI

The pilot project of the Paracity is growing on an urban farming island of Danshui River, Taipei

City. The island is located between the Zhongxing and Zhonxiao bridges and is around 1000 meters

long and 300 meters wide. Paracity Taipei is celebrating the original first generation Taipei

urbanism with high level of illegal architecture, self-organized communities, urban farms,

community gardens, urban nomads and constructive anarchy.

Paracity Taipei will be powered mostly by bioenergy that is using the organic waste, including

sludge, taken from the surrounding industrial city and by farming fast growing biomass on the flood

banks of the Taipei river system.

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Environmental technology components are mounted on barges that are plugged into the

Paracity maintenance docks. Barges can be modified according to the needs of the growing

biourbanism.

Paracity is based on free flooding. There are no flood walls. The first 6 m level above the ground

is not built, but the whole city is standing on stilts and thus providing the whole ground floor for

community actions, nature and space requiring recycling yards.

Paracity Taipei will construct itself through impacts of a collective conscious as a nest of post-

industrial insects. Paracity is estimated to have 15.000 – 25.000 inhabitants.

4.1.1. E L E M E N T S

1. Open form

In its growth Paracity is following the organic design methodology of Open Form (Oscar Hansen,

Svein Hatloy), in which community level design is viewed as an open dialog with design actions

generating spontaneous design reactions within the surroundings. Open Form is close to the original

Taiwanese ways of developing the self organized and often “illegal” communities. These micro

urban settlements are containing a high volume of Local Knowledge, which we also believe will

start composting in Paracity, when opening up the community development to the citizens.

Centralized architectural control is opened up in order to let nature including human nature to step

in. The life providing volume of Paracity is 11, existence maximum, highest possible life in the

given conditions, and more.

2. CLT Skeleton

Paracity provides the skeleton, but citizens bring in the flesh. Design should not replace reality,

Flesh is More. The skeleton, the primary structure of Paracity is constructed out of 6 meters long

(50x50 cm profile) cross laminated timber CLT sticks which are used to form 6x6x6 m cubes, that

are piled up to 16 stories high (8 cubes). The CLT primary structure has a fine earthquake

performance and it is fire resistant. The structural elements / sticks with wood joints are

prefabricated and transported to the Paracity Island on barges. The construction work – the growing

of the Paracity primary organism can be manually done by residents in teams of by professional

parasite constructors. The CLT structure is just a landscape on which citizens will attach their own

houses and gardens.

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3. Enviromental technology

The biourban growth of the Paracity is supported by high environmental technology which is

mounted on barges. These modular bio-vessels are attached to the Paracity service harbor and can

be adjusted according to the needs of the evolving urban organism. The post-industrial fleet of bio-

vessels can travel along the Taipei river system and is ready to start the biourban restoration process

also from other hot-spots of the river city. The environmental technology barges provide solutions

for:

• Waste water treatment of Paracity and of the surrounding Taipei

• Water purification. The infrastructural water circulation is originated from the polluted Danshui

River.

• Sludge treatment for fertilizer and bio-energy.

• Closed circuit aquaculture.

• Recycling of construction waste.

• Recycling of organic waste for fertilizer and bio-energy.

The barges have no problem with the flooding river.

4. Bio-energy

The main energy source for the Paracity is bio-energy, which is using both treated organic waste

and sludge from Paracity and surrounding Taipei and especially biomass that is harvested around

Paracity and on the flood banks of the Taipei rivers. The fertile flood banks, flood plains and storm

water channels provide ideal cultivation areas for fast growing biomass plantations. The vegetation

will be harvested by boats and then shipped to Paracity Bio-Energy Facility. The growing of the

biomass on the river banks will also benefit on the natural river restoration through root cleansing of

sediment pollution and the biomass will have a positive impact on the Taipei micro climate and

urban ecology.

5. Parasite Urbanism

Paracity is living off the material streams from the surrounding Taipei. Even the polluted river is a

resource for this biourban intestine. Paracity is Medieval medicine: using leaches to cure the

circulation. Paracity is letting off the bad blood of Taipei and it uses it a resource. In fact it makes

money out of the process. Officially 37% of the Taipei City waste water goes untreated to the river.

Paracity wants it all. And it wants all the other materials which the industrial city is regarding as

24

“waste”. Paracity and modern Taipei live in a similar kind of a symbiosis as a slum and the city: the

urban nomads will clean the static city from its “waste”; only in Paracity the cleaning and recycling

process is boosted up by high environmental technology. In a sense the Paracity is a high-tech slum.

6. Existence Maximum

Paracity is a seed of the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city (2G). The

modular biourban organism is designed to grow following the rule of nature: existence maximum.

The primary structure can be grown by people and after Paracity has reached the critical mass, the

life providing system of the CLT structure will start escalating. It will cross the river and start

rooting on the flood plains. Then it will cross the 12 meters high Taipei flood wall and grow

gradually into the city. Seeds of the Paracity will start rooting in the urban acupuncture points of

Taipei: illegal community gardens, urban farms, abandoned cemeteries and waste-lands. From these

acupuncture points the Paracity will start growing following the covered irrigation systems, such as

the Liukong Channel and eventually the biourban organism and the static city will find a balance,

the Third Generation Taipei.

7. Mediator

After rooting on the riverside and gaining a critical mass the Paracity will climb over the 12

meters high reinforced concrete flood wall which is separating modern Taipei from the rivers

and nature. The flood wall will remain in the guts of the Paracity, but the new structure enables

Taipei citizens to fluently reach the river. Paracity will reunite the river reality and the urban

fiction. Paracity is a mediator between the modern city and nature.

8. Bioclimatic Architecture

Paracity has a lot of holes, gaps and nature in-between houses. The system is ventilating itself like a

large scale beehive of post-industrial insects. The different temperatures of the roofs, gardens, water

bodies and shaded platforms will generate small winds between them and the hot roofs will start

sucking in breeze from the cooler river. Also the individual houses should follow the traditional

principles of bioclimatic architecture and not rely on mechanical air-conditioning.

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9. Free Flooding

Paracity is based on free flooding. The whole city is standing on stilts allowing the river to pulsate

freely with the frequent typhoons and storm waters. The environmental technology of the Paracity

is mounted on barges, which have no problem with the flooding either. Actually the Paracity is an

organic architectural flood itself, ready to cross the flood wall of Taipei and spread into the

mechanical city.

10. Biourban Restoration

Paracity is a positive organic tumour in the mechanical tissue of Taipei. While it is leaching and

processing the industrial and organic waste of the city, it is gaining momentum in its growth and

becomes more and more important to the static industrial urbanism. Paracity is an alternative reality

within the industrial development and will start treating the city the same ways as the urban

acupuncture points of illegal community gardens and urban farms of Taipei do today. Paracity has

the ability to become a network of biourban acupuncture tuning the whole industrial city towards

the organic, ruining the industrialism on its way to become part of nature, the Third Generation

City.

11. Organic Layers

The biourbanism of the Paracity is as much landscape as it is architecture. The totalitarian

landscape-architecture of Paracity includes organic layers for natural water purification and

treatment, community gardening, farming and biomass production as an energy source.

Infrastructure and irrigation water originates from the polluted Danshui river and will be both

chemically and biologically purified before being used in the farms, gardens and houses of the

community. The chemically purified water gets pumped to the roof parks on the top level of the

Paracity, from where the gravity will circulate the water into the three dimensional irrigation

systems.

12. Adaptability

The pilot-project of the Paracity is designed in Taipei, but the solution is developed to work in

different locations around the world. Paracity offers an alternative for the Chinese strategic urban

planning to start ecologically harmonizing the growing river cities of China. And Paracity can be

used as urban acupuncture for the emerging cities of China and elsewhere. Paracity can grow along

26

the Oshiwara chain of slums in Mumbai providing better living conditions, cleaning up the

Oshiwara River and more effectively treating the urban waste that is flooding in from the

surrounding city. Paracity can parachute into Nairobi and start growing from the fertile top-soil of

the slums. Paracity should grow into the favelas of Brazil and start celebrating the local knowledge

of these organic communities. Paracity is organic, adaptable and welcomes local knowledge. The

city is built by hands of a high diversity of different people.

13. Local Knowledge

Paracity is inspired by the Local Knowledge of Taipei, the original Taiwanese urban elements that

include a high level of self-made “illegal” architecture, self-organized communities, extensive

networks of self-organized community gardens and urban farms, fluid nomadic ways of using the

city, communicative collective subconscious in community and urban scale, feeling of dominating

the no-man’s land by human nature and other forms of constructive anarchy. The Paracity basically

only provides the primary structure, the three dimensional landscape for the Local Knowledge to be

attached and grow. The primary structure and the environmental technology solutions will remain

pretty much the same no matter in which culture the Paracity starts to grow, but the real human

layer of DIY architecture and gardens will follow the Local Knowledge of the respective culture

and site. Paracity is always site-specific and it is always local.

CONCLUSION

The way towards the Third Generation City is a process of becoming a learning and healing

organization and to reconnect the urbanized collective conscious with nature. In Taipei the wall

between the city and the river must be gone. This requires a total transformation from the city

infrastructure and the centralized power bureaucracy. Citizens on their behalf are ready and are

breaking the industrial city by themselves already. Local knowledge is operating independently

from the official city and is providing punctual third generation surroundings within the industrial

city and by doing that providing self organized urban acupuncture for the stiff official mechanism.

The weak signals of the un-official collective conscious should be recognized as the futures

emerging issues; futures that are already present in Taipei. The official city should learn how to

enjoy acupuncture, how to give up industrial control in order to let nature to step in. The local

knowledge based transformation layer of Taipei is happening from inside the city and it is

happening through self organized punctual interventions. These interventions are driven by small

27

scale businesses and alternative economies benefiting from the fertile land of the Taipei Basin and

of leaching from the material and energy streams of the official city. This acupuncture is making the

city weaker, softer and readier for a larger change.

The larger scale rapid change must also go business first. Third Generation Taipei is based on free

flooding and clean river, and this transformation is a huge business opportunity that can be

replicated in a large number or emerging cities in China, India and elsewhere. The organic fingers

growing from the fertile river banks will reach everywhere in the mechanical built human

environment and bring new kind of critical development for many sectors of industrial life. A large

number of new businesses will emerge. Through its own transformation Taipei can build up a

powerful business-model for ecological restoration of emerging cities. Facilitating this

transformation is hard if not impossible for the existing rigid structures of the Taipei City and New

Taipei City Governments. The futures oriented urban ecological restoration process and business

modeling could be facilitated by an external futures platform in collaboration with the Finland

Future Research Centre and Tamkang University Institute of Futures Studies.

The research is done though a series of workshops and courses with the Ruin Academy in

Taiwan and the Aalto University SGT Sustainable Global Technologies in Finland. The

Ruin Academy workshops have been realized in co-operation with the Tamkang University

Department of Architecture and National Taiwan University Department of Sociology.

The futures research is developed in co-operation with the Finland Futures Research Centre

and in dialog with the Tamkang University Graduate Institute of Futures Studies.

Ruin Academy is kindly supported by JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture. Architect

Marco Casagrande is the Principle of the Ruin Academy.

The thinking of the Third Generation City owns a great deal to discussions and co-operation

with architects Hsieh Ying-Chun and Roan Ching-Yuen with whom I am the WEAK! and to

professor Chen Cheng-Chen of Tamkang University Department of Architecture who helped

me in developing the theory of Urban Acupuncture and encouraged with the thinking of the

ruins. Professor Olli Varis from Aalto University has made it possible to develop the

multidisciplinary approach towards the River Urbanism. Joseph Redwood-Martinez copy-

edited the entire manuscript and helped in many other ways. Finally, I would like to thank

Stefano Serafini from the International Society of Bio-Urbanism who made this book

possible.

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