英文摘要 |
The ‘Urban Renewal Act’ has encountered several problems since its enforcement because of the institutional bias toward neoliberalism to attract inward investment into the dilapidated built environment and to stimulate the property-based secondary circuit of capital. This study applies a neo-Marxist political economy approach to exploring the structural relationships among the secondary circuit of capital, neoliberal urban governance, and urban renewal in the field of urban built environment. Analysis of the macro environment of political economy, the business cycle of the property market, and the institution of urban renewal in Taiwan reveal that, whilst the critical socioeconomic crisis is indeed apparent, the state tends to keep on ‘revalorizing’ property market. The state intention can be find from the ‘Urban Renewal Act’ and specific renewal policies, which have established a set of incentives through ‘state-led expanded rent gap’. Analyses of completed renewal projects in Taipei reveal that the effect of spatial fix driven by the ‘state-led expanded rent gap’ indeed has facilitated to increase the value of completed projects. Unlike the experience of western cities, the case of Taipei indicates that the mechanism under expanded rent gap has stimulated the occurrences of renewal projects less in downtown but more in the areas with property boom. The institution has also formed the rise of special ‘locally scaled neoliberalism’ in the urban renewal system in Taiwan, which seldom connects governing agenda with new global urban imagineering, institutionally responds to the speculative tendency of global neoliberalism, and ultimately benefits the local property capitalist bloc. |