Treasure Hill Co-living Village (or Treasure Hill Artivists Co-op) is originally a squatter settlement located at the southwest edge of the Taipei city, a piece of public land characterized by its intimate physical relations with a small hill as its backdrop and the adjacent river. It was prohibited from development by the Japanese colonial government as a water-resource protection area and guarded as a military ward after WW II, but its convenient and half-hidden location attracted multiple generations of squatters to engage in self-built activities. At the peak of its evolution, the Treasure-Hill Settlement was the second homeland of about 200 families and individuals - many of them were senile citizens, single veterans, social underclass, students, aborigines, and ‘new immigrants’ from cross-national marriage. Under its informal and pre-modern appearance, it reminisces the city's organic past and manifests the social network of the community's spatial structure. The aesthetic value of its chaotic surface, though debatable, is a clear reflection of the community's daily-life pattern. The residents' ingenious uses of public and semi-public spaces - makeshift arcade, waterfront farmland, terrace gardens, corner-store plaza with movable chairs, to name a few - exhibit collective local wisdom. This mundane hillside community could have continued to lead an ordinary village life if it was not zoned as an urban park according to the city's renewed urban plan of 1980. In 1993, the official announcement of demolishing the squatter was posted, and the Treasure Hill story entered a new chapter.

Treasure Hill as a cultural landscape involves discourses on its relationship with the surrounding natural environment, its local history, and community identification. From this stance, conservation of Treasure-Hill has gathered enthusiastic support from intellectuals, NGOs, and local citizens. After a series of organized protest and intensive study, the city government took a few steps back to survey the feasibility of a plan revision. Soon the planning responsibility for Treasure Hill was transferred from the Department of Park and Recreation to the newly established Bureau of Cultural Affairs, the cultural imagination further deepened the polemic of programming a "planned" village out of an "ordinary" settlement by piecemeal evolution.

OURs (the Organization of Urban Re-s, one of the main facilitators of the former conservation movement) is later commissioned by the Bureau to undertake the planning task. The conservation project of the ‘Treasure Hill Co-living Village’ intends to propose a co-living commune which incorporates the original resident units as "welfare homeland – an alternative social housing," a youth hostel (to balance future financial cost), an ecological learning field, and an artivists (artist-cum-activist)-in-residency program. All the residents of the new village may share community spaces and facilities and various workshops for arts and creative industry. In the long run, all the labor put to the care of the community is hoped to be transferred as substitute for rent or meals. The restoration is expected to be completed by November 2010, and some of the original residents have already moved back to their houses and started to pay much-lower-than-market rent to the city. Social housing is, in this case, a homeland saved through struggle and action.

Currently under the management of Tsuei-Ma-Ma Foundation for Housing and Community Services in collaboration with the International Artists Village of Taipei, both commissioned by the City government.

Annual budget from the government, monthly rent from the tenants, and profit from (future) youth hostel and shops. 

Public-private partnership between the City government, the neighborhood, and NGOs.

The conservation project restores the original village structure and the surrounding green, connected with the city via bike trails and MRT system. It is now zoned as a preservation area with little possibility for further development. 

The rent for the original squatter families is around 14 Euro/m2, much lower than average around the adjacent area and the city.