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.