Making artist neighbourhoods: production of urban space and culture in Hong Kong and Taipei

Abstract

This research uses extended case studies undertaken in two artists’ neighbourhoods, the Hong Kong’s Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei and Taipei’s Treasure Hill Village in Gongguan, to examine how historical state-owned spaces in old urban cores now have become new sites of production for artists and arts practitioners. It addresses how and why the two cities, with similar histories and urban strategies, have created and defined the artists’ neighbourhoods in different ways, resulting in diverse paths of socio-spatial development. Hong Kong and Taipei have constituted the few examples amongst East Asian cities that have converted state-owned properties into artists’ clusters under the management of non-profit organizations in recent years. In both cities, artists have become a vanguard for the revitalization of urban spaces that aim to serve the interests of the state, the cultural sector and local community through place-making practices, which entail participation in the production of meaning and local specificities of a place.

Research on urban cultural strategies of East Asian cities has put more emphasis on the political-economic factors as shaping cultural spaces but little on the social dynamics involved in spatial production. This study suggests that the new form of artists’ clusters in Hong Kong and Taipei requires an approach that incorporates the social dimension of space into an analysis of the artists’ neighbourhoods, which have tended to be less economically driven than the art districts run by business corporations. By focusing on Hong Kong and Taipei, this study shows that not only are the orientation and socio-spatial outcomes of the two artist neighbourhoods shaped by history and state definitions of cultural governance, but also by the social dynamics on the ground as configured by the different compositions of cultural space, the relationships between the management, cultural producers and local community, as well as their associated spatial practices.

This study demonstrates that Hong Kong’s Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre exemplifies a regulated space that has been shaped by contentious politics, in which incompatible spatial practices between the management by the non-profit company and the artists have created confrontations on a daily basis. The tendency of the non-profit company toward management practices, accommodating leisure and consumption experience, and including a wide variety of artistic experience has created contradictions and undermined social cohesion within the artist community. In the case of Taipei, Treasure Hill Village manifested the civic orientation of the state in cultural governance. The officials’ endorsements of social activists as cultural planners and artists as the drivers for community revitalization have reinforced public participation in cultural activities and public meanings of cultural space. The primary aim to foster collective sense of action within the artist community and the local residents in promoting civic engagement and social inclusion through arts has generated greater cohesion among the local actors. The differences between the two cases suggest that social dynamics have been central to how the experimental processes in place-making are realised and unfolded.