Taipei has an ugly beauty to it. Individually, the typical concrete, tiled covered buildings, are ugly, but cram them together, throw up some neon lights, a tiny park with a Daoist temple crammed in the mix, add a few street vendors and the bustle of people and its downright charming.

Cities in Japan are much better put together, but I prefer the chaotic, gritty feeling of Taipei, and Treasure Hill is an interesting segment of that.

Thanks a lot for posting this!

I actually used to live in a rented "house" in the place the article is about, probably around 1994-1995. Most of my neighbors were very old veterans, with a handful of NTU students who were rarely seen.

Talking with my veteran neighbors was fascinating for me. Most of them had stories of the Civil War and some had fought in WWII. They were from all over China and I had great difficulty understanding a lot of them. Even my wife, who grew up in Taiwan had trouble - I distinctly remember one neighbor, "Uncle Bo", who had suffered a stroke and was basically abandoned there by his family, who pronounced the number 9 like, "kyu" (like Japanese), among many other pronunciation quirks. I found out later that this is common in some dialect in mainland China, but I forgot where/which dialect.

The living conditions were pretty ... not great, with eroding concrete, scorching hot in the summer, and constant issues with moisture leaking in, but I think our rent started out at NT$2500 ($80 USD?), which was even cheap at that time. Our landlord later raised the rent to $3k and we "abandoned our post."

I still have a weird fondness for that time and place, though. It's conceivable that I am one of the last people some of those veterans told their stories too. People in Taiwan at that time were not terribly interested in stories old people told, so maybe I was even the _only_ person some of them ever told their stories too, but I went back there in 2019 and was happy to see all the work that had been done to record the stories and memories of my former neighbors in the artist village that is there now. I think there was even a little plaque for Uncle Bo, IIRC.

An inaccessible favela? Really? What is up with this apocalyptic view of the future?

The article doesn't say anything about what makes it actually the city of the future, apart from them recycling and filtering water.

Looks cool though, and has a nice backstory.

Dilapidated urban landscapes == internet catnip.

Solarpunk brutalism

The city of the future has abundant energy from solar.

Especially during sunny days, when no storage is needed, it will be extremely cheap to air condition and desalinate seawater.

Call me crazy but I really find cities like the one in Taipei really charming. I grew up in one, and there's something very human about this aesthetic.

(2016)

> Unfortunately, there was still a problem–the city couldn’t overlook the building codes. But Casagrande found a loophole: He declared that since the houses had been handmade, they were a form of art. “The city commissioned me to make a public artwork, and Treasure Hill is the artwork. That’s where [people] live now,” he said. “That’s how they rationalized it.”

That ignores the purpose of the building codes even artists can die in fires (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire). This is especially worse when you have families and children living there.

This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.

> This is Treasure Hill–a prototype for what one architect believes is the future of sustainable urban living.

Title should be "One architect's idea of the \"city of the future\" looks like a bunker"

The future city is ugly and built with and upon the scraps left by our military largesse.

Sounds about right.