I. Reflection and Transplantation
1. In the late 1970s, there was a new opportunity at Graduate Institute of Civil Engineering, NTU to set up a new school of architecture and city planning. We have the self-awareness that we could not repeat the colonial trap to reproduce an American school of architecture in Taiwan. With the support from some open-minded senior professors in the Civil Engineering Department, we set up the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning. At the beginning, we only had two full-time staff members.
2. The 1st Transplantation: Kevin Lynch's City Design Model
Our school members share some common ideas about planning and design, architecture, landscape architecture and city planning. We attempted to provide training of humanistic environmental planning and design for students. We adopted Kevin Lynch's (a humanistic socialist scholar) "City Design Model" which focuses on humanistic environmental discourse (Ref. Hsia 1992), to develop our course structure. Moreover, we were influenced by Christopher Alexander's ideas of "Pattern Language" which challenges and reflects upon the mainstream American architectural schools.
3. We tried to design a kind of "liberal education" in professional training. This was a common vision shared by the teachers and research assistants in our school. We created an alternative in Taiwan's professional school (planning and design). At the same time, although we accepted some planning projects offered by local governments and wanted to actualize our new ideas about planning, we faced a lot of difficulties in "implementations" which was caused by political obstacles rather than technical problems.
4. The 2nd Transplantation: The Paradigm Shift and the Critical Social Theories/ the Neo-Marxist Approach in the mid of 1980s
Our school began to develop the new fields of "Political Economy of Space" (Castells, Harvey etc.), Critical History (Architectural History: Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice School) and Cultural Studies (in the 1990s). We develop the programs for Master and PhD students as two different programs. The former emphasizes on practical competence while the latter is much more academic and research orientated. In this period, the Foundation of Building and Planning, a non-profit organization having ten years experience since 1990, is established to engage more actively in various planning projects.
5. The brief history mentioned above illustrates our capability of changing ourselves steadily with the social transformation in Taiwan during the last few decades. The teachers and students of our school deeply involve in urban social movements, including empowering the grassroots, historical conservation, community strengthening, against squatter clearance and feminist movements. We connect ourselves with local governments and the local development in the new era of globalization. Our school also Provides training for "radical" or "progressive" planners, critical designers and leftist scholars.
II. Critical Reflection:
1. Theory and Practice: Autonomy and Interaction
On the one hand, the researcher has to take his responsibilities to do a good research. Certainly, a good theory has to be put in practice; however, research should be viewed as a simple "tool" for practice. The quality of academic work has to be judged by its contribution to academic discussion and the dialogue between theory and practice, rather than "political fashion" or "political judgment". Research and theoretical work should have relative autonomy.
On the other hand, activists have to make political judgment rather than derive guidance from theory. No theory can tell the activists exactly what they should do. The practice needs specific capability of flexibility to adjust to the changing reality. The most critical principle in the practice of the ancient Chinese garden making for landscape architects is "to devise measure according to local characteristics" (yindizhiyi). This is also certainly an essential lesson for activists.
Both theory and practice need relative autonomy and their relation is dialectical and historically complicated. The relationship is not a metaphysical exercise from philosophical questions to philosophical answers. Instead, the problematic comes from practice and all research questions have to respond to the real questions of practice. The key to bridging theory and practice is "problematic", the mode of posing research questions. For instance, "command economy doesn't work" is a part of history and reality in practice. While research is evaluated by its scientific criteria, political position needs political judgment. In other words,
practice raises questions but not answers directly. Usually, the right-wing researchers raise questions without theoretical foundation or full of ideological prejudice. However, the left wing researchers fail to do a solid research even after they raise good question. We have to do good empirical research and have to know what and how exactly happen in reality rather than make theoretical deduction.
According to positivism, research is considered as neutral, but in fact it is often social and institutional reproduction. The Leninist paradigm gives priority to politics which takes command of everything and results in dogmatism. Now, the interactive autonomy between theory and practice creates an interactive boundary between different social actors and interactive communication. No neutral researcher is possible and a critical researcher needs self-awareness and reflexive subjectivity. The interactive autonomy enables one to enter the inter-subjectivity among various social actors. The interaction between the subjectivities and their relative autonomy are the precondition for "problematization", i.e. posing research questions and making dialogue. This interactive space is the key element to solve the problem caused by the division of labor of theory and practice. The social actors play the roles like those in the different players in a volleyball team. Their mutual understanding and interaction are crucial to success.
2. In order to facilitate social change rather than involve in the reproduction of global capitalist system, radical intellectuals, including researchers, professional planner and designers, have to deal with their relations with the state and social movements historically and practically. What is at stake here is not the relations among researcher, planner and designer, but their relations to the state. The state always absorbs them into the routine reproduction of the establishment. The intellectuals are obliged to escape from the "logic" of reproduction and initiate "social change" by restructuring the state, especially the local state. In other words, a critical political intervention is to find maneuvering space against the domination of the state and open up more possibilities for the powerless rather than the power elites.
The intellectuals partially situate themselves in civil society, a domain that is outside the state apparatus, remains connected to the state and sometimes challenges the system. Hence, citizen participation operates in an ambiguous space both inside and outside of the institutions, which provides possibilities to increasingly transform the nature of state and regain people's power.
The dialectical interaction between theory and practice enables us to have further reflection upon the role of intellectual. The "progressive" intellectuals should abandon their role of avant-garde in "guiding" social movement. However, the populist view that social movement represents the truth or a standard of "political correctness" is not acceptable. Instead, some middle class community movements appear to be the most conservative reaction against progressive social change. The role of radical intellectuals should be providing analytical understanding and reflection to the actors of social movements.
There is no general rule for the relations between social class, state, and radical intellectuals because they operate in different levels and interact in a historical and contingent way, rather than a determined way. Although good research questions are generated from practice, good answer depends at least partially on "professional" knowledge which "translates" planning strategies into people's practical knowledge and appropriates symbolic resources to help people express and understand their own situations. That is why planning education is important. Without rigorous professional training and in-deep understanding of society, progressive planners become arm-chaired radicals chanting slogans without substantial meaning. An institution for producing critical knowledge is crucial to support the progressive intellectuals to reflect upon their positions and environment. Otherwise, even a "revolutionary" might becomes a stubborn bureaucrat after graduation under the pressure from the state.
Finally, let me say a few words about the roles of radical intellectuals, including those working on theoretical intervention, planning in the public sphere, (re)designing the symbolic representations of space. All of them pursuit social transformation in different routes and do not submit to any predetermined hierarchy. Liberating the leftist from the Leninist-elitist dominance, we have to search for new interactive roles for the autonomy of intellectuals in the fields of theory, planning and design respectively.
Most radical intellectuals get used to fabricating "cities of tomorrow", making utopian dreams and promising social progress and revolution in the future. However, social movements, as the driving force of civil society, function less as a utopian picture drawn up by revolutionary leaders than as an alternative classroom which transforms people's personal and collective identities in political process. What is to be done? This is not a theoretical question but a practical one. The answer can be found only in different historical moments and the interaction among social agents with self-reflexivity.
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