[Editor's Note]Big Cities or Great Cities?

So why did the government decide to reorganize Taiwan's cities and counties?

Interior Minister Jiang Yi-huah says that the reorganization of seven major population centers of Taiwan has created five special municipalities that will serve as engines driving regional development, fostering interurban competition, and building attributes that will make them stand out on the international stage.

Three new municipalities were created and another was increased in size in order to achieve the goals of boosting administrative efficiency and national competitiveness, elevating the scale of Taiwan's cities from small to large. However, are such resource-rich big cities suitable for living? Are they truly "great cities" that bring contentment to their residents?

In 1961 Jane Jacobs, an American magazine editor with no college degree or professional background, offered up a major inquiry into what makes a "great city." Starting from her article "Downtown Is for the People," she dissected the development problems faced by major American cities in depth, including inner-city urban decay, suburban sprawl and urban renewal, and later completed the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which caused a great jolt in the fields of urban planning and architecture in Western countries. Its influence persists to this day.

Jacobs looked at the examples of urban construction in the leading American metropolises of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, covering the early blueprint-style urban planning process used in the US, the principles of development, and zoning, as well as the tear-down-and-rebuild urban renewal strategy. She argued that these strategies may well eradicate unsightly, outmoded older areas and replace them with uniform high-rises, and that the unemployed populace would move out and the crime rate would drop. However, such a facade of prosperity is hard to maintain. The cancer of urban decay may have been displaced, but its causes remained undiagnosed.

She argued that a city, due to the variety of different residents, was like an intricately ordered organism, requiring mutually supporting, detailed and diverse modes of land use. Of the involved factors, diversity is of fundamental value to a great city. Just as biodiversity is a necessary condition for the stable development of a cohesive ecological system, the diversity of a city's people, cultures, businesses, communities, and buildings old and new must meet the different life needs of the residents. This is key to enabling a city to endure.

Bearing Jacobs' ideas in mind, as Taiwan's five special municipalities blossom, this moment offers a good opportunity for us to reconsider what kind of cities these major metropolises should become.

In many people's minds, Tai-pei is not big or beautiful enough, New Tai-pei is not modern enough, and Tai-nan is not new enough. Of the merged cities and counties, some regions remain rather shabby; the facilities and infrastructure of cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul have Taiwan's cities beat. The pressure in Taiwan from this global urban competition is considerable, but the safety, friendliness, tolerance, dynamism and intrigue of Taiwan's cities are things to which other cities constantly aspire.

In a related vein, food safety is also a major concern related to land use planning. For Taiwan, which depends on imported food, and can control neither climate change nor international food prices, self-sufficiency in local foods and reduction in food shipping distances must become options for securing our quality of life. The "grain revival movement" taking place on small wheat and soybean farms in Chang-hua and Yun-lin should be encouraged.

Once the conditions are right, the next step for Taiwan's big cities is to become great cities!