Garden City as a Techno-Spatial Assemblage under Wartime Urban Regime

A Case of Jhongsing New Village, Taiwan

Abstract

Based on the 1950s-history of East Asian Cold War geopolitics, this paper illustrates how the idea of Western Garden City was techno-spatially reassembled by the Republic of China (R.O.C.) Government exiled to Taiwan to assist its wartime urban regime for enforcing air defence-evacuation strategy. We use Jhongsing New Village (JNV) – the seating of Taiwan Provincial Government – as a case owing to its status as not only the earliest detail new town plan in postwar Taiwan, but also a specific local (re)assemblage of hybrid planning legacies, new planning technology, and martial spatial politics – the Britian Garden City utopia, air raid experience and revanchist deployment of the Nationalist technocrats, and Japanese planning legacy in Taiwan – to shape a regional warfare evacuation town. JNV provided a place for experimenting cold war city through spatial components with variegated modernity threads, planning culture genealogies, and national contexts. Integrating the 1950s-historical materials of Taiwan’s spatial planning with the viewpoints of urban policy transfer and regime theory, we propose the concept of “wartime urban regime” (WUR) to scrutinize the influence of the Martial Law on Taiwan’s municipal governance. Connecting the Japanese colonial planning legacy and modernity imagination inherited by the planning technocrats, we explore the planning concepts, geo-strategic intentions, and institutional reassembling process of JNV and argue that, as a spatial device projecting WUR, JNV is a remixed product of cold war spatial planning providing a contested lab for multiple planning ideas – fulfilling air defence evacuation, compromising Japanese legacies and technocrat ideals, and learning new planning knowledges.