Description

1.       Introduction

Community has been deployed as important techniques for governing the individualised society. By mobilising the idea of community, it attempts to activate citizens to maximise their capacities in tackling with local problems.  With this activation of individuals, it economizes the delivering of state’s expenditures and localized problems for a more self-governing community subject with which connected by shared-interests, affinity and locality (Rose, 1999). In the meanwhile, this construction of community makes it become governable object for the modernization of state’s apparatus.  Owing to these, the deployment of community has become driving force of initiating urban policy and urban regeneration agenda (mainly on neighbourhood level) in the UK as a dominant strategy for Third-Way discourse(Amin, 2005; Brownill & Bradley, 2017). 

Whilst the deployment of community become important techniques in developing urban policies, this mobilization of community has been revealed with many different meanings beyond Anglo-Saxons discourses. For example, community development in China is greatly affected by the ideology of Communist Party and Party-State governance. After the reformation of planned economy, the deployment of community plays an important role on both decentralizing and recentralizing governance (Wu, 2002; Bray, 2006). For Taiwanese case, the employment of community is a symbol of democratization process after long-term authoritarian regime (Huang, 2004; Huang and Hsu, 2013). Community development has great impact in forming participatory- planning system which attempts to liberate citizens for taking more parts on decision-making (Huang, 2004).

In recent times, community governance has been greatly influenced by ‘policy mobility’ phenomena for which policy-makers desire to mobilise new ideas, new experiments to face dramatic challenge of neoliberalisation. In Taipei, ‘government-led regeneration’ project started from 2016, this new policy seeks to mobilise community as one important strategy to develop joint partnerships of government, non-state actors and local people to accomplish regeneration (Taipei city government, 2016). With the cooperation of private professionals, it hopes to not only generate new ideas from elsewhere but also to empower residents to be more willing to participate in planning system. For Shanghai, ’15-minute community life cycle’ was developed in 2016 in order to regenerate communities and develop partnerships with professionals from various fields.  It is believed by the policy-makers that this cooperation can learn from those workable policies and strengthen the governance of community. The mobilisation of new techniques into community and the constructions of community has thus been regarded as crucial strategies for the dominant planning practices.

It is in this context that this research aims ‘to explore understandings of community and how they are embedded within in and reconstructed by the planning systems of Taipei and Shanghai’. By exploring this issue, this research attempts to make contributions on three parts. First, updating debates over community governance by addressing issues such as fast policy circulation. Second, fixing the gap between community governance and policy mobility. It is because while existing debates of policy mobility have provided an overall understanding for the dynamic process of transferring policy ideas (McCann, 2011; Peck, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010) and pointed out difficulties and political effects over these mobile experiments (Brill, 2018; Brill and Conte, 2019), it still need more understanding of policy impacts in reality. Finally, investigating empirical cases beyond Western experiences and compare cities where with different social, economic and political context.