Urbanism across: new urban ground in Taipei's old city core

Abstract

This thesis re-imagines Taipei's urban core as a series of above and below urban spaces that weave together disparate neighborhoods around the city's main train station. In the late 20th-century, following the post-war economic boom of Taiwan, the government initiated a huge construction project that relocates Taipei's railway infrastructure under the ground. This project initiates the new construction of metro systems and total two-kilometer-long underground passageways, which accommodates the commercial and public activities originally existing on the ground level. This adjustment resulted in the city center a huge sterile plaza surrounded by large driveways, devoid of the formation of public activities. This thesis explains how the overly engineering-oriented thinking of underground space design that channeled pedestrian movement away from the street can disconnect the city's public space and the trace of local history. Instead, the thesis proposes urban strategies and designs across several scales: human perception, architecture, cultural-scape, and landscape, to create an active, accessible, sustainable, and multi-layer public space to breathe new life into Taipei's historic core. Challenging the government and international renewal plans proposed in the past decade, that densify the site without much consideration to the historic context, pedestrian network, and surrounding neighborhoods, this thesis proposes a set of new linkages between the public space above, and pedestrian flows below. New designs proposed in the thesis transform the current pedestrian experience through establishing a network of semi-outdoor, outdoor, and interior gathering spaces, and in between the urban ground and infrastructure. Activated by a diverse range of programs, the city center is thus 'liberated' from its current infrastructural limitations and is offered back to the residents and the multicultural identity of Taipei, and Taiwan.