Making Streets: Planned Space and Unplanned Business in New Kujian, Taiwan

New Kujiang, a shopping destination in Southern Taiwan known for youthful fashion and imported goods, emerged in the 1980s. As part of Taiwan's national project to modernize its business environment, New Kujiang was reconstructed in the image of Euro-American shopping streets a decade later, Although the revitalization project and its cosmopolitan image fit in with the official vision of globalized urban space, its incorporation into this national project was not a seamless process. The ideal was confounded by incomplete execution of the project and troubled by customary practices that also sought participation in the market. Looking into ideas of urban commercial districts that informed the planning of New Kujiang and the actual process by which the space was constructed and occupied, this study seeks to understand the aspirations, contestations, and imaginations that enter into processes of constituting global-local spaces.