Reassembling transnational planning knowledge in the 1950s-Taiwan: Chunghsing New Village as Cold War urbanism

The study revisits the flows of planning knowledge during the early Cold War in Taiwan. The case of Chunghsing New Village (CNV) reveals that planning practices can travel from some place to others for learning and imitation but variegated urban geographies result in diversified territorialities. In a state of wartime emergency, transnational knowledge travel and its local learning process are often practiced in a hasty, mixed, and fragmented manner to respond to the possible warfare risk. The study sees this transnational flow as an assemblage process adjusting and reconfiguring varied planning techniques owing to the geographical differences. We conceptualise the idea of ‘techno-spatial assemblage’ to illustrate this phenomenon. As the first planning case applying the British Garden City concept in postwar Taiwan, CNV was not a replication from the British counterpart but a techno-spatial assemblage remixing several planning ideas as the components at the transnational level - urban air-defence measures of the Republic of China during the World War II, expert fieldtrips to the British new towns, and the urban dispersal concept of the American planning. This wartime experiment presented the nature of hasty implementation and fragmented learning, making CNV difficult to be a planning paradigm in Taiwan.