| This dissertation shows how street vendors in Shilin Night Market, in Taipei City, Taiwan, through spatial, social, and material practices, shape and reshape an urban landscape. I find the space they produce to be a vernacular representation of modernity for an authentic urban identity. Dealing with the municipality and local community, street vendors have continually appropriated public and private property in both legal and extralegal situations. Municipal officials and urban planners have followed these spatial practices in an effort to fix, standardize, and tax their vending spaces. Extralegal vendors, provoked by this official scrutiny, developed a spatial practice of "fluid occupancy" supported by social relations, micro politics, and embodied performances to sustain their operation outside legal boundaries. Culturally speaking, the culinary practices of domestic and migrant food vendors, and the clothing vendors' involvement with transnational wholesale trades, stretch the identity of Shilin Night Market from that of a local trading place to a liminal space that subsumes a grounded, place-specific practice within a network of transnational flows. Despite the fact that street vendors created economic and cultural capital as the basis of a thriving market, they eventually became the targets of removal in the political discourse of reframing the market as a tourist space shaped in the spirit of capitalist modernity. To maximize the transnational quality of Shilin Night Market as they seek to forge a cosmopolitan identity for Taipei, municipal officials redeveloped the market into a prominent tourist destination, building a new, indoor market and relocating extralegal vendors into storefront arcades under the privatized governance of a property association. Eventually, some street vendors were incorporated into the municipal prototype, and others have kept contesting unauthorized space. I celebrate the hybridity of this commercial landscape that unifies the steady and the fluid occupancies of public space, as well as the global and the local synergy infused within the setting. My dissertation suggests that modern design practices can pursue process-driven planning strategies that forego displacement and exclusion, seeking instead to balance esthetic and economic concerns with an acknowledgement of the social ecologies of physically and culturally distinct, urban places. |
