Quote:
Originally Posted by Quixote
What are your thoughts about Taipei and Taiwan as far as urbanism, food, culture, and general inscape?
|
Taipei is great. The city invites wandering, since 90% of it is built at Parisian-level densities, and the Taiwanese have a strong culture of living their lives on the street, which adds to vibrancy and makes for tasty street food. For those of us who live in cold climate cities, it's very welcome to walk through a place where the front "wall" of a store is largely open and missing.
As a tourist, there are still a few things that I didn't like about Taipei:
It still does kind of feel like a bit of a peripheral place. It's not a cowtown, of course, but it's not very cosmopolitan and it is the primary city for Taiwanese people, not a place where people from far away come to try out new things. East Asian cultures are not immigrant societies, and I don't hold that against them, but there are Asian cities that have had more of a culture of attracting people from far away, because that's where you have to be to do what you want to do. Taipei is not a city anyone who's not Taiwanese really needs to settle in, and it shows.
Similarly, I'd say that while Taipei is great for wandering, eventually the neighbourhood experiences kind of repeat themselves, and traveling through the city feels like going through a Flintstones backdrop. I probably have biases, though: if not immigrants who are visibly different, there may be Taiwanese/Chinese subcultures that sort into one neighbourhood or another, and I'm just oblivious to these.
And, as people have mentioned, the architecture is generally bad and unvaried. It's made up by the fact that the street level is so great, but if you look up you generally see a lot of ugly, clunky buildings with mildewed tile and bits and pieces hanging off the walls.
Even if the underlying urban fabric is fantastic, cities should have a variety of neighbourhoods with different architecture and urban forms - even if some of those urban forms are less "urban" than the ideal. In very dense, vibrant cities I really appreciate visiting genteel upscale neighbourhoods where there are sometimes detached homes and plenty of greenery. I'm not talking about suburban, car-oriented detached home neighbourhoods, but more like what we would think of as "streetcar suburbia". Taipei would do well if it had an area like the French Concession of Shanghai, or something like that.