The Graduate Institute of Building and Planning is a unique academic platform which bridges social-and-spatial theories and actions through required practicum courses and engaging in advocacy discourses. The praxis-based core values in building and planning have cast a long-lasting impact on social activism of the democratized society and thus established strong links with several radical and grassroots organizations in Taiwan (particularly OURs - Organization of Urban Re-s, Tsuei-Ma-Ma Foundation for Housing and Community Services, and Community Empowering Society Taiwan) which all sustain the grassroots movements and continue to bring community participation into public policy and planning process. With emphases on social justice, urban conservation, social housing, environmental sustainability, and community empowerment, the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning often organizes conferences (is expected to co-host a couple of housing conferences in 2011) and policy-making symposiums to install overlooked social and environmental values on the capitalistic public sector, and in the meanwhile collaborates with autonomous or disadvantaged communities and NGOs to initiate progressive planning and spatial actions.

1. Encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration and in-depth dialogues between diverse social groups in building and planning process.
2. Engaging in sustainable and site-sensitive planning as well as creative modes of socially-responsible and participatory design from bottom-up.
3. Mobilizing spatial activism for social justice and cultural inclusiveness, while curbing the market-dominated developments which might destroy community fabric and environmental ethics.
4. Reinforcing a professionalism in building and planning which can integrate the skills and knowledge of form-making with social commitment and environmental stewardship.
5. Reforming the existing housing policy and design practices based on the premise that housing is a basic human right and the collective housing mode should engender a sense of community or neighborhood living.

General situation:

There are a few factors which contribute to the conundrum of Taipei's housing situation today:

1.     Even in the modern and crowded city, most urban residents in Taipei are captivated by the traditional ideology of ‘Own thy land, thus own thy fortune,’ and housing is deemed as a private property to be owned and sometimes invested(nearly 85% of land and house ownership in Taiwan, compared to around 40% in Germany). The inadequate housing policy and insufficient quantity of public housing (less than 9% in Taipei) further increase the dependence of housing supply on real-estate market. When the exchange value of housing far exceeds its use value, particularly under the circumstances of hand-in-hand operation by the bureaucratic governing body and the laissez-faire corporate, housing and land speculation becomes an inevitable social problem.

2.     The limited amount of existing public housing in Taipei, not unlike many modernist urban-renewal models, suffers from poor management and design/construction quality and gradually exacerbates into synonym of slum. And while the housing shortage is acute, high vacancy rate of the extant housing numbers (due to both investment-oriented absent ownership and uninhabitable conditions) poses another awkward situation regarding if the government should build more public housing to meet the demand.

3.     Taiwan’s post-martial-law democratic evolution instigates certain types of advocacy planning and movements to call for the governmental response to the issues of social justice and social welfare, but social housing is still not on the agenda of housing/reform policy or legislated as operable schemes. The government released substantial yearly mortgage to help the young (presumably the less financially-established) family to acquire their housing grounding, yet it turns out to promote real-estate prosperity more than to achieve a balance of social justice. The disempowered and disabled social minority often find no access to cross the threshold of housing market even with the rent subsidy provided by the government. The unit price of housing is simply too high that if housing costs 1/4 of an average Taipei household’s annual expenses, it will take 42 years for such a household to able to purchase a regular housing unit. Let alone families of low-income and the less resourceful. There are still available, though scarce, public lands controlled by central and local governments and government-related monopolies, yet they are often relegated to the bidding game by the powerful corporate in the name of urban development. Social housing and other modes of experimental housing (co-housing, for instance) can hardly find any entrance into the realm of competing public lands.

4.     Housing design is dominated by maximizing the allowed floor area coverage and the modernist norm, – in another words, cultural and ecological factors of housing or the elements of sustainable design only begin to surface in recent design and construction practices in Taipei. The very few examples of public housing or social housing are the least favored by those who are eligible to reside. But the new housing design paradigm and discourse might have certain impact on foreseeable future development.

5.     All in all, there lacks an appropriate administrative authority of housing which can make workable housing policy, acquire and allocate annual budget for housing, and help establish resource network (especially financial and community resources); and in the meanwhile, non-profit and community-based housing association and co-op (some are evolved out of a significant social movement “Shell-less Snails” two decades ago) strive to make an impact on recent election by organizing grassroots alliances and proposing new white book on housing for the candidates. The road of housing reform in Taipei is still rocky and tough.

Strategy:

1.     Legislation of Housing Law and founding of a Housing Authority (Department) to formulate and execute housing policy and to clearly address the issues of social housing and affordable housing in planning agenda.

2.     Ensuring remaining public lands for public use and social/low-income housing of sustainable and cultural quality, and promoting adaptive reuse of public buildings and defunct housing quarters (housing as a strategy of historical conservation) for new-genre public housing and programs.

3.     Building grassroots or community network for social-housing development, and encouraging collaborative and mixed-income housing experiments to minimize mistakes from the past public housing stereotypes.

4.     Linking the planning of public/social housing or the revitalization/remodeling of existing public housing with the community-empowerment programs, cultural infrastructures, social services, and necessary urban amenities.

5.     Lessening/loosening the institutional/bureaucratic control and management of public housing by creating innovative programs to sustain community autonomy and neighborhood vitality.

6.     Curtailing the land price by intervening the financial regulation process and making (re-zoning) the best use of public lands.