Just up the street, URS 155 Cooking Together inhabits similar historic digs but is a very different beast. At street level it’s a boutique highlighting specialist local provisions such as dried fruit and spice mixes from venerable, family-run Tuan Yuan. H
to dislocation and protest. “In the past we tended to focus on the ‘hard’ infrastructure, but we realized we were neglecting the ‘ soft’ part of the urban fabric—the communities,” says Hu Ju-chun, an official at the city government’s Urban Regeneration Office.
The URO sums up its new strategy as “urban acupuncture”—that is, small, selective changes that attract the flow of visitors and commerce (i.e. “energy”) to neglected areas, and reclaim abandoned spaces through which energy is “lost” and that therefore have a negative impact on their surroundings. The “needles” in this model are known as Urban Renewal Stations (URS), typically old or underutilized buildings that are repurposed based on the suggestions of residents, students, artist groups—basically whoever wants to speak up.
The URO provides an online platform to collect and discuss these ideas. It may help a group negotiate with a building owner or provide some token funding to get an activity started, but the agency is basically hands-off, taking the view these stations should evolve (or fail) organically. The result is a somewhat bewildering— but promising—assortment of venues, from outdoor music platforms to design workshops, popping up in previously blighted places.
To see how this urban acupuncture works in practice, I head to Dadaocheng’s Dihua Street. The first thing I notice is the area’s energy. Scooters piled high with boxes duck and weave through its narrow lanes, so different to the broad boulevards of modern Taipei; jumbo cans of cooking oil and barrels of pungent medicinal herbs spill onto the sidewalk; and crowds mill respectfully around the incen se dwrea thed Xiahai City God Temple. The second thing that strikes me is the buildings, a lovely hybrid of Chinese shophouse and prim, Victorian-style red brick, some with elaborately carved facades and many slightly worse for wear.
Having made a beeline for URS 127 Art Factory (the stations are named for their street number and theme), I quickly discover these old structures are even more impressive on the inside. Lofty ceilings and long, narrow rooms extend back for what seems like miles before opening onto intimate walled courtyards, which in turn give way to yet more rooms, like a house of mirrors. In the Art Factory’s case, these spaces are given over to a shop selling curios from local design houses like Uncle and Sister, a maker of stationery emblazoned with kaleidoscopic cartoons (often of Dadaocheng street scenes), as well as a top-floor studio and exhibition hall and (in the aforementioned courtyard) a pop-up alfresco café.