From old town to new city: A study of behavior settings and meanings of streets in Taiwan. (Volumes I and II)

This study of streets is based on behavior setting theory and the use of a non-verbal communication approach to environmental meanings involving physical cues. It is focused on physical, temporal, boundary, and cultural factors that have not been explicitly addressed in earlier research; it also provides new concepts and modification to behavior setting theory. This research involves a synchronic study using ethnographic and graphic methods for data collection and analysis in two residential-commercial mixed use streets that have rather different developmental histories and physical characteristics. It also serves as a snapshot case study of how people in Taiwan organized their activities and behavior setting systems in street environments.;Behavior settings are congruent units involving standing behavior patterns within synomorphic milieus, and are organized into a larger system supporting the activity system. They are seen as a form of non-verbal communication through the organization of fixed, semi-fixed, and non-fixed physical cues expressing the social situation, limit of the setting, and expected behavior in it. Behavior settings in the streets are found to be dynamic entities that often result in modification of spatial boundaries; they also involve contact surfaces allowing penetration and direct communication between them. Behavior settings in the two streets vary in their definition by fixed physical barriers and semi-fixed cues, yet they form comparable setting systems indicating great resemblance in both the nature of programs and use, and spatial organization in the larger environment. Given the intensive modification of the environment through semi-fixed cues facilitating behavior settings that function as equivalents to many in the old street, the new street is seen not only as a Western design that is arbitrarily imposed and unfit for the local culture. It is also a re-creation of the old street which has gone through more than two hundred years of development and gradual modification to accommodate the way of street life in Taiwan.