VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

For decades, debates over the fate of Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Park in Taipei City have been hindered by conflicting interpretations of the site’s meaning, heritage value, and role in urban transformation. These discussions had often been reduced to semiotic debates with two opposing views: pro-demolition advocates who were persecuted by the Taiwanese authoritarian government during its rule and right-wingers who defend Chiang’s authority. In July 2022, a design competition called ‘Conceptual Design Competition for the Heart of the Capital: A Vision for Transforming Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park’ was launched by groups of spatial experts and funded by the Cultural Ministry. Unlike typical architectural design competitions, this competition has included public participation events such as on-site tours, lecture series, design workshops, and experts’ forums. The goal is to create a multi-dimensional process that involves people from various sectors and opens up possibilities for creating new meaning for the park through public participation. The authors of this study, who participated in organizing the design competition, explore the social dialogue generated during the process by applying action research methods and participant observation. This study applies assemblage thinking to understand difficult heritage as emerging social phenomena and to reflect the social relations between humans and non-humans. Heritage is seen as a social action that facilitates people’s involvement in meaning-making, and the design competition is seen as one social actor as well as a strategy for public participation, mobilizing the silent majority and encouraging those lacking initiative to produce proposals through images. Through this study, the potential of design competitions as a methodology for social action, as well as the challenges and limitations encountered during the process, are examined.