Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of New Urban Planning on Indigenous Communities

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

As more and more indigenous people move to metropolitan areas at rapid rates, municipalities are confronted with urban planning challenges that must balance a range of stakeholder concerns: the infrastructural needs of the city, the stress that is placed on resources, and the importance of preserving the heritage that draws so many people to cities to make them creative centers. This project explores the relocation of a group of indigenous migrants, and how planners develop architectures designed to permit these groups to flourish as urban indigenous subjects with distinct cultural traditions. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, asks how such urban planning initiatives targeted at urban indigenous populations contribute to cultural and socioeconomic transformation. The results will be useful to engineers, architects, policymakers, and urban officials tasked with the responsibility of building and managing these systems. Stanford University doctoral candidate, Tomonori Sugimoto, under the guidance of Dr. Miyako Inoue, explores the construction of new built environments for urban indigenous people. The researcher will conduct research on one such urban planning project targeted at the urban indigenous population in the Taipei region, Taiwan. In Taiwan, close to 50% of the Austronesian indigenous population has settled in metropolitan areas. In 2014, Taipei's suburban municipality of New Taipei City initiated experimental projects to relocate several indigenous squatter communities located on state-owned riverbanks to newly-built "indigenous cultural park areas." The researcher will investigate the ideals and intentions of city officials and architects in relocating indigenous squatters to these new communities. In addition, the researcher will examine what kinds of impacts relocation to new communities might have on community residents' cultures, livelihoods, and community. The researcher will employ methods such as in-depth interviews with city officials, architects, and community residents, participant observation of community meetings and city council meetings, analysis of expert architectural knowledge, and archival research. This research will further our understanding of how urbanization is affecting indigenous communities, a topic that is poorly understood despite the fact that in many countries the majority of indigenous people today reside in urban areas. Furthermore, the research will contribute to scientific understandings of how urban planning and new built environments can have impacts on processes such as cultural change and economic marginalization. This research will be of interest to scholars, architects, urban planners, and policymakers.