Land-taking for technology parks: informality as a question and solution

Principle Investigator：Li Qi, PhD student, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

My dissertation studies the tangled process of land expropriation in the remaining villages of Taipei and Shanghai in government-led technology park projects. The current land enclosure by the two metropolitan governments has faced great challenges in acquiring land that is attached to informal housing and fractional subdivisions. The phenomena of informal settlements and inadequate property rights are prevailing in the studied areas due to several reasons: (1) the highly complicated property transactions on the metropolitan fringes over the long urbanization history, (2) the increasing demand for accommodations of population inflows, (3) the problematic regulation on the land use, and (4) the land speculation in urban development projects. To work through the difficulty in acquiring the land, both metropolitan governments have taken multiple development techniques, such as forced eviction, zone expropriation, and selective formalization. Correspondingly, villagers and residents who owned or lived in such informal settlements also proposed alternative solutions for maintenance and relocation.

By conducting in-depth fieldwork on the local communities, this dissertation aims to investigate multiple development paths of informal settlements and related social impacts in the ongoing technology park projects in Taipei and Shanghai. It is structured by six core research questions: (1) What are the challenges to expropriating informal settlements in specific urban expansion contexts of Taiwan and China? (2) How do the two governments deal with informal settlements through zoning techniques? (3) Regarding informal property rights, how do the local communities mobilize, debate, and react, and what are their major concerns? (4) What are the socio-economic effects of distinct exploitation patterns of informal settlements? (5) How to identify the substantive public interest in such land takings? (6) How is it possible to come up with a negotiable and inclusive development pattern for informal settlements?