Planning narratives and development realities

Jiufenzi is a former 100-hectare aquaculture farm that was developed into a low-carbon community in southern Taiwan. This chapter discusses the plans, narratives, logics, and actors that enabled this transformation over the past 40 years. In Jiufenzi, we see how government-led urban expansion engaged urban planning and land readjustment as a social-political process in value creation and contestation among different value systems of land, including economic, environmental, and social, and how the development realities become the materialized space where these values are negotiated and prioritized among different actors. We also see how planning narratives, from urban growth, ecological restoration, and green community to low-carbon, evolved in enabling development and densifying the initial low-density residential area. Under the self-financed and market-driven rationality, the vision of a green community was hardly achieved with increased density and profound implications for quality of social life and environmental carrying capacity.