All For an Egg:A History of a Controversy

For four years beginning in 2002, everything connected to the Taipei Athletic Park Plan (or Taipei Dome BOT)-from the rezoning, to the appropriation and transfer of the land, to the soliciting of bids for the BOT (build-operate-transfer) contract, to the moving of the original residents-went smoothly. It wasn't until October of 2006, when the city signed a 50-year BOT contract with the FarGlory Group and then dug up and transplanted 800 trees from the site in the following year, that the plan began to attract a lot of monitoring and discussion among citizens.

This old camphor tree was retransplanted to the culture park zone early this year. The trunk and branches have been wrapped in rice straw to reduce moisture evaporation, and the base is encircled by holes to improve soil aeration. Much human effort has been put into keeping this old fellow alive and kicking.

Moving old trees

At the end of 2006, Taipei City's Parks and Streetlights Office announced that it would finish removing and transplanting the sites' large old trees within a year. The entire process involved trimming their roots and crowns during the previous growing season and intensively caring for them during the half year after they were transplanted. With the agreement of the Taipei Tree Protection Committee (set up by the city Department of Cultural Affairs), a total of 680 trees in the areas of the site that were to be dug up were transplanted to the future site for Nangang's Baohu Junior High School, which is known as "the tree bank" (possible to be replanted elsewhere later); over a hundred were lucky enough to be outside the dig area, and were left in place; and another 160-plus trees have been "temporarily stored" in the cultural park portion of the Songshan Tobacco Factory site. These will await the completion of the Taipei Dome's construction before being returned to the sports park area. Lastly, five very old giant trees-including a camphor, banyan, India rubber tree and red fruit fig tree-were transplanted permanently to the cultural park out of fear that they wouldn't survive long or repeated moves.

And yet, when large cranes and bulldozers began to roll in and out of the site, the birds and insects that had peacefully resided there weren't the only ones that were startled. What was happening there also alarmed the site's human neighbors. They gasped at the disappearance of green space, worried about the survival rate of the transplanted trees and had questions about why the city was in such a hurry to transplant the trees before the environmental impact assessment had been completed. The process followed by the city government in its haste is certainly open to discussion.

The protesting citizens discovered an issue of even greater concern the following year when they learned that one-third of the 384 trees that had been transplanted to Baohu Junior High had already died (the parks office lists the number of dead trees at 103). Arborists who were hired by community residents and environmental groups proposed coring some of the dead trees to determine whether any of them were 50 years or older and thus required to be saved under tree protection regulations. They thus hoped for the public to take a lesson from this fiasco. Little did they expect that on the day that the coring was to take place they would learn that the parks office, wanting to "prevent the spread of disease," had already completely removed all of the dead trees and thus all of the evidence!

Responding to citizen concerns, the parks office carried out its own study about why the transplanted trees had died and came up with these reasons: (1) in some of the locations to which the trees were transplanted at Baohu Junior High, the water table was too high (this wasn't determined until some dead trees had been removed); (2) because of a high clay content to the soil, very little air could permeate it, which led to rotting of the roots; (3) some of the trees were diseased and their health deteriorated rapidly after they were transplanted.

The parks office has asked the contractor to plant replacement trees and promised that it would improve its protection measures. In February of this year, the final tree-an aged camphor, 15 meters tall with a 23-meter-wide crown before being trimmed-was removed from the sports park area of the site, leaving a depressingly barren scene. The wholesale removal of the trees is now a fait accompli. But it is only one of the battle lines in the struggle between preservation and development.

From the air, you can get a clear idea of the expansive, park-like grounds of the Songshan Tobacco Factory (which can be compared to the grounds of the golden-roofed Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, visible in the upper right corner of the two photos). The buildings in the upper left part of the two photos, obscured by trees, are in the "cultural park" area of the site, which is being preserved in its entirety, trees and all. Meanwhile, for more than two years, the Taipei City Government invested considerable funds to transplant the trees from the "sports park" area of the site (which is tree-covered in the photo at the top of the page, but cleared in the lower photo) to other locations. It was hurrying to ready the site for its March 2009 transfer to the Farglory group, which was awarded the BOT contract to build the Taipei Dome. In the future, some of those trees will be replanted in the "sports park" area, but with structures scheduled to cover 80% of the land area, there will only be enough open space for small, shallow-root trees to survive; none of the most impressive of the old trees will come back.

The second round

At the beginning of 2008, due to some changes to its plans, the Farglory Group submitted documents for a second planning review and environmental assessment. According to Farglory's development report, the 70-meter-high dome in the "Taipei Cultural and Sports Park" will have construction costs of NT$9 billion, and will be surrounded by a shopping center, department store, 120-meter-high hotel and office building. FarGlory will also place a huge LED advertising sign at the nearby corner of Zhongxiao East Road and Guangfu South Road, which will show ads 24 hours a day.

Many of the members of the review board believe that there is a problem of proportionality, seeing as the commercial facilities will occupy about 250,000 square meters, roughly double the area for the dome. The plan for dealing with the impact on traffic has also been criticized as lacking in detail and precision. Thus the board resolved that Farglory should redraw its plans and resubmit them for review.

In February and July of this year, Farglory submitted paperwork for a second environmental impact assessment and third planning review, but these did not allay the board members' doubts about the scale of the project, the traffic issues, or their concerns about the proportionate size of the commercial facilities in relation to the dome. Hence, the board asked Farglory to submit more documentation, after which it would review the matter again.

Modified plan?

Recalling the course of events that have caused repeated changes of plan, Hsia Chu-joe, a professor at National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, who once served on Taipei's design review board, wrote in an essay published in 2006 that getting the Taipei Dome to coexist with the Songshan Tobacco Factory is already, from a professional and technical standpoint, no easy feat. But the key problem is that "successive mayors of Taipei have had a great desire to build the dome, and the company that was awarded the contract was very cognizant of that. As a consequence, the city government systematically lost scope to negotiate, and that made it very difficult to get an outstanding design and plan."

Huang Jui-mao, an associate professor of architecture at Tamkang Univeristy and director of the Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs), says that the selection of the site for the Taipei Dome was affected by the desire to use land that was already state-owned to speed up a project that could impress voters. Ironically, he says, "if the city had originally decided to build it on the Guandu Plain-although it would have had to invest more in basic transportation infrastructure, and spend more time acquiring and preparing the land-that would have avoided impacts on the environment, views and city traffic, and the Taipei Dome would have been finished long ago!"

New challenges

Today, because conditions have changed yet again, old arguments about whether the dome is really needed have resurfaced. The most basic doubt is this one: Currently professional baseball and important amateur games have an average attendance of under 10,000 people. That kind of turnout can't support a major domed stadium. And other athletic events, concerts and exhibitions already have large-scale facilities they can use. Does Taipei really need a large domed stadium just for baseball games?

The Taipei City Department of Education has organized a "Construction Planning Office for the Taipei Dome Complex" which is overseeing FarGlory in revising the environmental-impact and urban-design reports. However, this office has refused media requests for interviews on the grounds that "the details of the design haven't been worked out." Its determination to keep a low profile seems to suggest that the city government is under a lot of pressure with regard to this issue.

In any modern society, puralized public opinion means that urban renewal projects will always be subject to much debate and revision. Let us hope that rational debate and citizen participation will help to perfect the overall plans for the reuse of the Songshan Tobacco Factory site.