The Exploration of Urban Daily Life: Practising the Cultural Life Circuit in Urban Taiwan

Abstract

Contemporary Asian countries have pursued the goal of becoming new and more developed countries by undergoing mega-regional urban redevelopment. The process of spatial reconfiguration has destroyed many existing historical neighbourhoods, their local character and cultural identities. Furthermore, people’s recognitions of spaces, daily life and local interactive networks that had operated for several decades have been interrupted by the changes to their physical living area.
This thesis aims to formulate new urban research and planning methods to analyse and practise within contemporary Asian urban (re)development. It applies participant observation, photo diaries and photo elicitation to integrate the perspectives of the government, planners and locals on the development of regional planning. It also discusses two perspectives of urban area formation, individual behaviours and the results of social interaction and their related theories, exploring their advantages and weakness for informing urban design. Furthermore, it discusses time-geography which represents the importance of time in urban development, and how peoples’ choices and the paths they take during fixed periods form local life. It also, explores the concept of rhythm to complement certain weaknesses of time- geography and develops ideas based on theories of the Circuit of Culture, Cultural Landscape,
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Lifescape and Cultural Life Circle to construct a new concept: the Cultural Life Circuit (CLC).
The Cultural Life Circuit draws together three approaches to understanding the urban cultural milieu. It acknowledges that the cultural landscape embeds activities in places and brings traditions and gives meaning to places. It draws from Life Circuit work which examines the weaving of activities across more than neighbourhoods. In the context of social change if combines those ideas with the Circuit of culture which looks at the interaction of the production and consumption of cultural forms and their iterative development, but largely without reference to concrete places. It adds to this an attention to rhythm to incorporate the temporal shifts in the way places are woven together, what they mean and how they are used. It thus forms a heuristic device to think through the spatially and temporally malleable weaving together of places that sustain the circulations of people and subtend their sense of urban life.