Pre-Task

GUANDU – Taipei from the River

Cross-disciplinary urban design management for Guandu flood plain in Taipei Taiwan. Landscape-urbanism from urban river angle.

Partner Implementer: Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development

Mentor: Marco Casagrande, C-Laboratory Finland
Mentor, local contact: Frank Chen

Overview

Taipei City is located by the Danshui and Keelong Rivers in the Taipei Basin surrounded by mountains on three sides and opening up towards the Pacific Ocean. Around 6 million people live in the area. Metropolitan Taipei is estimated with 10 million.

Taipei City has kept the 720 hectares Guandu Plain in the meeting of the Danshui and Keelong Rivers as a reserve of urban development. Now the city is planned to extend to the Guandu Plain and the Department of Urban Development is looking forward to ecologically sustainable solutions of the future urban development.

The first generation Taipei grew to a fruitful river valley with the rivers as the main transportation route. The rivers provided food and much of the agriculture was based on flooding. Taipei was fully dependent on the environment.

Urban planning and industrialization was introduced by the Japanese. Hyper-industrialization took place starting from the end of 1940’s when the millions of Kuomingtang loyalists retreated to Taiwan after a lost civil war in the Mainland China. The second generation Taipei, the industrial city, claimed independence from the natural environment – the rivers got walled off from the city and got heavily polluted. Taipei is a model of the Asian industrial urbanism.

Future Guandu is viewed as the possible site of the Third Generation Taipei. The objective of the studio is to develop the cross-disciplinary design methodology of the third generation city with urban river characteristics.

1. 150.000 new inhabitants in ecological communities
2. Flood plain and urban river natural restoration
3. The implementation of environmental technology
4. Innovated transportation
5. Bio-climate effect to Taipei City