The Museumification of Treasure Hill: Authenticity, Authority and Art in a Taiwanese Urban Village

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses the “museumification” of an urban village in Taipei into the Treasure Hill Artist Village in the context of wider debates on gentrification and the redevelopment of marginal urban spaces. Populated by soldiers evacuated to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War, Treasure Hill became a hybrid space, combining welfare provision for elderly veterans with an artist colony, forming part of the Taipei Cultural Foundation. Lauded as a compromise that combined social, cultural and economic aspects of urban regeneration, the mix of high-modernist paternalism and neoliberal place-making resulted in the integration of the space into the existing city bureaucracy as a museum-like institution, with elderly residents and artists becoming exhibits in a living diorama. Although widely understood as “gentrification” at the time, the article argues that the museumification of Treasure Hill was a process led by a coalition of state and spatial experts which has distinct implications for the study of state-led neighbourhood amelioration.