Making Place in Taipei in Architecture and the Everyday

This paper explores place-making in Taipei, using artefacts, architecture and fragments of the social experience to draw out the tension between the place-making as a set of policy and planning formulations, delivering corporatized and globalized visions for the city and place-making as a set of experiences, practices and memories at the level of the everyday. The paper argues that place-making at the governmental level in Taipei has a logic of monumentalism, expressed most clearly in Taipei 101, that uses architecture to mediate the lived experience of the everyday. It contrasts this with the museum space of Sisi Nancun, using the notion of deterritorialization, expressing the intersection of the material, political and signification in vectors of Taiwan‘s transformation. The experience of development in Taipei subverts its own mediation, using tactics of cooption, redeployment and resistance to reassert the meaning of the city as place of history, memory and practice.