| Summary: | In the past ten years urban adaptation in the changing climate has become a primary concern for urban governance, as cities, especially those in developing countries, are burgeoning while natural disasters escalate, Securing the human habitat in the urban areas has became central to the sustaining of the human race. Dealing with urban water, therefore, is a ceaseless struggle between nature and the human need to seek new knowledge and technology in urban water governance. Being a city in great danger of flooding, Taipei's way of taming urban water has been a long process of disaster experience, knowledge learning, policy transferral, and negotiation with local citizenry. By delineating Taipei's water taming process, not only we can understand the city and water through their co-evolving processes, but we can also re-think how urban water has been conceptualised by man, and how this conceptualisation has affected the human dwellings on the waterfront. To depict the shifting human-water relationships of Taipei, this thesis employs the Deleuzean assemblage theory, treating Taipei's urban water governance as an assembling process of natural events, knowledge learning, mobile urban policy, urban informality, and neoliberal ideology. By adopting assemblage theory in the case of Taipei's urban water governance, the interweaving of floods, water knowledge, historical incidents, human dwellings, and the conducting of neoliberal urban governance can thus be re-figured in a processual manner, as a part of the constituting of the urban assemblage. Through attending to each of the constituents of this assemblage, seeing all parts of the urban assemblage as active and significant, this thesis not only demonstrates how water and the city shape each other, but it also indicates new possibilities in negotiating with neoliberal urban governance.
|
|---|
