It’s been in the works for a very long time due to COVID delays, budgets, ethics and logistics, but at the end of June 2023 we finally started the community workshops for our collaborative research into urban heat and greening in Taipei. The workshop and associated fieldwork is the culmination of our ESRC-NSTC funded project into urban greening for climate-resilient neighbourhoods in the UK and Taiwan; and is also leading us into the larger follow-on project funded by the British Academy under the International Interdisciplinary Projects scheme.
The focus of our Taipei fieldwork is Shezidao, a low-lying neighbourhood in Taipei City located between two rivers. Shezidao has a long and contested development history, and there are still fierce debates within Taipei as to how the area will be developed (or not) from now on. But regardless of where one stands on the future of Sheziado, what is clear is that climate change risks are intensifying, and that this will impact on the neighbourhoods of Shezidao as it will for the rest of Taipei. So with that in mind, we want to know more about how the residents of Shezidao experience extreme heat, and how they see the green spaces in their neighbourhood as helping them to cope with the challenges they are facing.
Our work in Shezidao involved two activities: face-to-face questionnaire interviews with residents on their experiences of heat; and a two-hour participatory workshop where we took a back seat and asked residents to tell us about the environment they lived in and how they experienced changing weather. The Taipei GI Lab led by Wan-Yu Shih and the Classic Design and Planning consultancy led on the workshops, which were held largely in Hokkien (Taiwanese language) and also in part in Mandarin Chinese. Meng-Chin Tsai – a PhD researcher at the School of Engineering and Innovation at the Open University – joined us as well, to learn from the process and develop some ideas for her own research project.
In my research career to date, I’ve done workshops in all kinds of places: government offices, fish markets, cinemas. But this is the first time I’ve ever been involved in a workshop held in a temple. In Shezidao, temples play an important function for the community beyond faith. They are spaces where people can gather, connect and keep cool.
The clock turned 7pm (it’s too hot during the day for people to come out) and we had no participants. But after we went to pray at the temple – and dropped some money in – people started to emerge from the houses as they finished their evening meal, and soon we had a crowd of about 15 people of all ages gathered round our maps.
We started with an overview of the project, where I gave an overview of the parallel workshops we are running in Pollok and Govan in Glasgow (with Meng-Chin translating) and of how heat is affecting Scotland’s urban dwellers, before we handed over to Taipei GI Lab and to Classic to get people talking. Things kicked off with a big printed map of the neighbourhood, where we asked the residents to locate themselves on the map and then left it to them to tell us about where they go and what they do when it’s hot. An energetic and frantic discussion ensued for a good 15 minutes, with my colleagues doing a great job of steering the discussion while I tried to make myself useful by photos and handing out juice.
The next exercise was intended to help us understand what people do to keep cool when it is hot, and to assess their thoughts on the neighborhood they live in. To make this a bit more interactive, we laid out a long yellow rope on the ground, and got one of the research team to stand at either end, one person holding a big ‘thumbs up’ sign and one holding a big ‘thumbs down’ sign. Our facilitator Ming-Yi then read out a series of questions, and those participating were asked to gather under the sign that best represented their response to the question. As flooding is an especially key issue in Shezidao, we also took the opportunity to ask everyone about the depth of floods they had experienced, by asking them to stick green dots on a life-sized polystyrene cut-out to represent the height of flooding they had experienced in the past. Finally, we gathered everyone back round the map for a wrap-up session, to reflect a bit more on their experiences of hot weather and of how they understand their locality.
We are very grateful indeed to the residents of Shezidao for coming out and sharing their insights with us. Like the neighbourhoods we are working with in Glasgow, Shezidao is very much an over-researched community, so we are trying our best to think carefully about how we plan our work and to reflect on how we can work with residents to build a lasting relationship and feed back some of our findings. We look forward to sharing more with you soon!
Read more about our projects at our new project website: https://www.open.ac.uk/research-projects/urban-greening/home