Sustainable Urban Regeneration in Taiwanese Old Urban Districts: From a User s Perspective

Transcription

1 Sustainable Urban Regeneration in Taiwanese Old Urban Districts: From a User s Perspective Chao-Chih Lin 1, a, Hsien-Hsin Cheng 2, b 1 Dept. of Urban Planning, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, Dept. of Urban Planning, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, 701 a chaochihlin@gmail.com, b janeshin@mail.ncku.edu.tw ABSTRACT The researchers intend to approach urban regeneration issues in old urban districts from a user s perspective. Instead of experts evaluation and professional disciplines, this research relies on the users perceptions about the factors of the built environment on a livable urban district. The case study areas are two historic districts in Tainan city Chihkan district and Minsheng greenpark district. In order to measure the users attitudes about regeneration issues, the researchers use Likert scale in questionnaire for users to fill in the right scale of their perception. The users to be surveyed can classify into two groups: 1) inhabitants in a district, 2) tourists and long term workers in a district. As for inhabitants, questionnaire mainly concerns with the livability issues of an old district, for instance, the impact of high density on life quality, or satisfaction about local traffic; whilst for tourists and long term workers, questionnaire concentrates on cultural tourism issues, for instance, the attractiveness of gourmet, cultural heritage or the degree of importance they feel about the retailing stores and department stores in old districts etc. After collecting the questionnaires from both two groups, multivariate analysis is used in coding. By factor analysis, the key constructs concerning a livable district can be concluded with priority order, for instance, cultural heritage as the most important construct, a neighborhood for all social hierarchy as the second important construct, and a convenient neighborhood as the third important construct and others. By descriptive statistics, the tourists attitudes about historic districts can also be summarized, for instance, which element is more appealing to most tourists, or how important do most tourists feel about reused old buildings etc. KEYWORDS: a livable urban district, a user s perspective, likert scale, factor analysis. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of this project is to build a liveable urban district from user s persepctive. Instead of relying on experts disciplines, this research starts from surveying about the public perception concerning the built environment of old urban districts. By collecting questionnaires from the main users group of urban districts - inhabitants and visitors (Jacobs, 1961), the user s attitude can be analyzed in a quantitative method. Multivariate analysis is used in this project to structuralize all the related factors of users evaluation. However, the interpretation of a liveable urban district should not only depends on vernacular culture and customs, but also international planning concepts, for instance, urban village (Gans, 1962; Neal, 2003), sustainable community (Barton, 2003) or new urbanism (Calthorpe, 1993) etc. Hence, the subject of public questionnaire concentrate on liveability issues such as local traffic condition, accessibility to amenities, a social mixed neighborhood for all groups of people, the impact of cultural tourism on community life quality, frequent remodeling of old buildings etc. 167

2 The researchers select two historic districts (designated by Tainan municipal government) for questionnaire survey. Figure 1 demonstrates the location of two historic districts in Tainan city. The area enclosed by green dot line and four main traffic circles are approximately old urban center and old CBD, which contains eleven neighborhoods and 7112 family units, its population is 19160, and the densityis is people per hectare. A: Chihkan historic district B: Minsheng greenpark district Figure 1. Historic districts for inhabitants and visitors questionnaire survey 2. QUANTITATIVE METHOD 2.1 Public perception analysis concerning the built environment The quantitative method in this research use software SPSS 10 as the tool for multivariate analysis (Hair, 2006). The major subjects of the inhabitants questionnaire are as follow: 1) The inhabitants perceptions about the liveability of their neighbourhood, 2) The inhabitants attitude about urban regeneration and cultural tourism policy of local government. 3) Can we find the correlation between the socio-economic attribute of inhabitants and their perception or attitude about the built environment. 2.2 Factors analysis Factor analysis is an interdependence technique whose primary purpose is to define the underlying structure among the variables in the analysis. This research project use exploratory factor analysis to structuralize the inhabitants perception about the built environment of old districts and find out the main constructs concerning sustainable urban regeneration (SUR) issues. The main purpose is to use fewer number of dimensions (number of constructs) to represent the original data structure, and keep most of the information in original data structure. The functions and advantages of factor analysis can be concluded as follow: 1) figure out the patterns of complex, multidimensional relationships in a set of multivariate variable. 2) develop exploratory research and find the potential characteristics for future experimental use 3) develop empirical typologies of variables. 4) reduce the number of dimensions of variables. 168

3 5) develop a data-based uni-dimensional index to discriminate by maximizing the user s variance. 6) test the hypothetical correlation among the variables. 7) transform the prediction variables to simplify the structure, and use special techniques to represent such as multiple regression or canonical correlation. 8) scaling perceptual and favored data, and represent in a dimension. 3. Sampling and public questionnaire survey 3.1 Questionnaire for inhabitants Concerning the liveability issues, the researchers use Likert scale to survey the perception about the built environment of the historic districts, also the degree of supportive about the cultural tourism policy. The questionnaire is composed of four parts as follow: 1) Basic life style information: survey the family life condition of the inhabitants. 2) Perception about the livability: this part of questionnaire concerns with the community living function and the impact of cultural tourism to the daily life. 3) Attitude toward cultural tourism policy and urban regeneration plan: this part of questionnaire test the degree of supportive of inhabitants to the related public policy about cultural tourism. 4) Social status: survey the social background of the inhabitants. The researchers start the inhabitants survey in two selected historic districts of Tainan old urban center from May to August of 2008 Chihkan district and Minsheng greenpark district. The sampling matrix are all the inhabitants in old urban center (refer to figure 1). Since the population is as big as 19160, the researchers then use cluster sampling method to survey, which means questionnaires were only distributed to the house with plates in two historic districts. Totally 500 questionnaires were distributed and 105 replied. By Factor Analysis, 30 questions concerning livability issues were reduced to 9 constructs (factor 1~factor 9) according to the eigenvalue, in which this value should be larger than 1; however, factor 6 - Comfort and Convenience, factor 7 - Renewal and Renovation, and factor 9 - domain of district are not reliable according to Cronbach s α, since that the value of these three factors are smaller than 0.5. The other six factors are reliable according to eigenvalue and Cronbach s α, the questionnaire items of the six factors, percentage of variance and their factor mean are listed in table 1 below. Table 1. Factor analysis result with factor rotation concerning the livability of historic district, as perceived by inhabitants Principle Factors Factor 1 Fascination of historic district Questionnaire Items Factor rotation Factor Mean eigenvalue Pct. varianc e Cronbach s α Cultural Heritage and historic estate Gourmet Cultural tourism bring in tourists, and create business A lot of tourists Renovation of amenities in old 169

4 district Factor 2 A community for all social hierarcies Factor 3 Community life Functions Factor 4 Cultural and socioeconomic network Factor 5 The impact of high density on life quality Kid s community Middle income family community Easy access to amenities Senior citizens community Easy access to schools for children Grocery shopping and conventional markets for daily needs A community with various shops Easy access to banks, post office, etc Rich and frequent cultural resources Rich social network and activities Community empowering organization Required shopping in other districts tourists influence the daily life High intensity business influence life quality Traffic congestion make local traffic in a difficult situation Factor 8 Problem of vehicles Arcades or sidewalks occupied by scooters Traffic congestion caused by vehicles Total percentage of Variance 49.34% As can be seen from this analysis result, the most important factors to compose a livable historic district are such as fascination of historic district, a community for all social hierarcies, community life functions, and cultural and socio-economic network. Some side effects of cultural tourism such as the impact of high intensity on life quality and vehicles problem are also crucial, thus, they should be considered as negative indicators for a livable historic district to improve. 3.2 Questionnaire for visitors Visitor s questionnaire is to request the interviewees to evaluate the importance of the related factors of cultural tourism by their personal experience. The purpose is to explore how attractive and important these related factors are to the tourists and long term workers in the district. By field survey, the researchers first conclude ten factor of cultural tourism in old urban center as follow: 1) conventional grocery shopping, 2) Department store, 3) Gourmet, 4) Folk culture, 5) Neighbourhood plaza, 6) Remodelled old buildings, 7) New consuming business, 8) Pedestrian friendly network, 9) Street landscape, 10) TOD (BRT). Secondly, the researchers use simple random sampling for visitor s questionnaire in historic sites; totally one hundred and fifty interviewees finished the questionnaire. 170

5 Figure 2 shows the visitors distribution graph concerning the importance of ten factors of cultural tourism in historic district, as perceived by tourists and long term workers using the likert scale. As can be seen from the distribution of importance, Y axis refers to the importance of a factor on cultural tourism of historic district, and X axis refers to the number of interviewees. From this analysis, only factor 7 new consuming business shows normal distribution. However, some factors shows more important than the others, for instance, factor 1- conventional grocery shopping, factor 3 Gourmet, factor 4 folk culture, factor 5 - Neighbourhood plaza, factor, 8 - Pedestrian friendly network, factor 9 - Street landscape, factor 10 - TOD (BRT); in which factor 1, 3, 4 and 5 are factors with vernacular characteristics, whilst factor 8, 9 and 10 are related to design issues of a urban village. As for factor 6 remodeled old buildings, it is ragarded as low importance, and factor 2 department store, the importance evaluated by visitors is not significant. Figure 4. The distribution of the importance of ten factors on cultural tourism of historic district 4. CONCLUSIONS Quantitative method is an sysmatic way to conclude the users persepctive concerning their attitudes about livablity. Hence, factor analysis result illustrate the key factors and some negative indicators, and the distribution graph represent the visitor s evaluation on ten factors of cultural tourism in historic district. However, from planning and design points of view, users perspective are valuable and should be respected though, the practice of a sustainable urban regeneration still rely on 171

6 professional planning skill, and probably negotiation with users. This project is just a good start of communicative planning, and initiate from bottom-up approach. It provides the professionals a chance to review whether top-down planning can correspond with users points of view, their perception and their community life function needs. REFERENCES Barton, Hugh et al. (2003), Shaping Neighborhoods: A Guide for Health, Sustainability and Vitality, Spon Press. Burton, E. (2002), Measuring urban compactness in UK towns and cities, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 29, Calthorpe, Peter (1993), the Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Chen, C.C. (2005), Motorcycles safety and management, Taiwan Transportation Forum. Cheng, H.H. (2003), A Historical Study on the Development of RC Building Construction Adapting to the Climate in Taiwan, doctoral dissertation, Department of Architecture, University of Tokyo. Gans, H.J. (1962), the urban villagers: group and class in the life of Italian-Americans, Free Press of Glencoe. Hair, Joseph F. et al. (2006), Multivariate data analysis, Pearson Prentice Hall. HRH The Prince of Wales (1989), A vision of Britain: a personal view of architecture, London: Doubleday. Jacobs, J. (1961), the Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Modern Library. Kees Maat & Paul de Vries (2006) The influence of the residential neighborhood environment on living satisfaction:testing the compensation hypothesis, Environment and Planning A, volume 38, pages Neal, Peter (2003), Urban Villages and the Making of Communities, Spon Press. Tainan City Government (2006), Specification for Changing Tainan Midwest District Master Plan Comprehensive Review, Tainan City Government. Tainan City Government (2006), The Redevelopment Plan for the Historical District of Jungshan and Jungjang Roads in Tainan City, Tainan City Government. Tainan Old City Regeneration Foundation (2006), Fucheng Historical and Cultural Scenery Conservation Plan, Tainan Old City Regeneration Foundation. 172