Beyond the shi-jie neighbourhood unit: constructing an education-belt for the Kaohsiung city of tomorrow

Urban fragmentation is often seen as a failure of planning. This paper repositions it as a condition for civic infrastructure reuse and reactivation, using Kaohsiung, Taiwan, as a critical case. It reframes shi-jie neighbourhoods – originally school-based units – as morphogenetic seeds for multi-layered education infrastructure. Through arcaded corridors, inverted streets, and sunken railways, it proposes an ‘education belt’ linking institutions, mobility, and civic programmes across territorial scales. Drawing from Cedric Price’s flexible urbanism and the logic of the 15-Minute City, the study envisions a translatable model where learning and public life interweave as distributed civic systems. Reframing school-based neighbourhood units as morphogenetic infrastructure enables scalable reuse of civic systems in fragmented urban contexts.Proposing an ‘education belt’ links institutions, mobility networks, and public programmes into a territorially distributed civic framework.Revitalising arcaded corridors, inverted streets, and sunken railways transforms residual infrastructure into active learning – dwelling interspaces.Grounding interventions in spatial history supports long-term urban regeneration and coordinated infrastructural adaptation. Reframing school-based neighbourhood units as morphogenetic infrastructure enables scalable reuse of civic systems in fragmented urban contexts. Proposing an ‘education belt’ links institutions, mobility networks, and public programmes into a territorially distributed civic framework. Revitalising arcaded corridors, inverted streets, and sunken railways transforms residual infrastructure into active learning – dwelling interspaces. Grounding interventions in spatial history supports long-term urban regeneration and coordinated infrastructural adaptation. Moving beyond the Global South imagination, Kaohsiung demonstrates how postcolonial conditions of incremental reuse can offer transferable strategies for civic resilience beyond formal masterplanning.