| This dissertation aims to explore the following questions: What is the impact of economic, political, and cultural globalization on the formation and transformation of discourses of historic preservation in Taipei? How do these discourses of historic preservation inform public policies? How do the various social actors negotiate, construct, and define their visions of Taipei as a global city through preservation planning processes? Drawing from the literature of the global city, the social analysis of the causes and outcomes of historic preservation in the (post)modern world, and the concept of "heterotopology" coined by Michel Foucault, I analyze Taipei's preservation projects with a "heterotopological approach" that emphasizes the multiple interpretations of a historical built environment according to the "global/local articulation" of the society in which the site is located.;I argue that the development of Taipei's preservation policies and the social meanings that preservation projects articulated were to a large extent influenced by the way the city connected to the global economy and global geopolitics. The rise of Taipei's civic consciousness of historic preservation in the late 1980s was derived from the residents' need to reshape a sense of place in the rapidly changing built environments brought on by economic and cultural globalization. Moreover, the institutionalization of the consciousness of preserving the city's past, i.e., the formation of preservation policies and the implementation of preservation programs, created a simultaneously real and imagined space in which various ideas of nationalism, localism, and tourism were proposed, negotiated, and debated.;My study of the cultural politics of historic preservation in Taipei suggests that by supporting nationalism, localism, and tourism, historic preservation has been a major strategy for people to create a sense of place in modern society. Moreover, this study suggests that invoking "the past" for the political project of reconstituting a sense of place in a world of globalization could serve both the purposes of social control and social liberation. In which direction a preservation project will move depends on the ways the collective memories of the local place are recomposed and represented. |
