Acupuncture is the procedure
of inserting and manipulating needles into various points on the body to
relieve pain or for therapeutic purposes. Urban
planning integrates land use planning and transportation planning to improve the
built, economic and social environments of communities. Urban
design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and
cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of urban public space.
Environmental
art is art dealing with ecological issues and possibly in political,
historical or social context.  Sociology is a science of
human social activity. Anarchy is acting
without waiting for instructions or official permission. The root of anarchism is
the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this.The community
gardens and urban farms of Taipei are astonishing. They pop up like mushrooms
on the degenerated, neglected or sleeping areas of the city, which could be
referred to as urban composts. These areas are
operating outside the official urban control or the economic standard
mechanisms. They are voids in the urban structure that suck in ad-hoc community
actions and present a platform for anarchy through gardening. For the vitality
of Taipei, the networks of the anarchist gardens seem to provide a positive
social disorder; positive terrorism. They are tuning the industrial city
towards the organic, towards accident and in this sense they are ruining the
modern urbanism. They are punctual organic revolutions and the seeds of the
Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the industrial city.Corners are windyClaude
Li-Strauss believes in the beauty of the human nature as part of nature. Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno lost all the hope for the industrial development
and said it has failed the promise of the Enlightment - it had corrupted
humanity. Andrei Tarkovsky?s Stalke (Mosfilm, 1979) is taking sophisticated
people into the Zone, where their deepest wishes may come true. The Zone which
is the organic ruin mirroring the surrounding mechanical reality. For the
Strugatsky brothers (Arkady & Boris) the Zone was a Roadside Picnic (1972,
Moscow). The community
gardens of Taipei are Roadside Picnic. Grandmothers can take us there, like
Stalker. The honorable Li-Strauss could be happy to start new ethnographical
research between the parallel realities of the cultures of the urban compost
gardens and the surrounding city ? the reversed modernization and focusing in
Local Knowledge. Horkheimer?s & Adorno?s graves should be moved in one of
these urban acupuncture spots of Taipei. Here even they would find hope,
surrounded by the valueless modernity and hard industrialism. Prof. Jaakko Heen-Anttila
has said: ?The valueless void of the society of today will be filled with
ethics: the corners are windy.? With the recognition of the urban farms and
community gardens Taipei has found its corners. What is the
ethics then pushing through these corners into the city? It could be called
Local Knowledge, site-specific reactions building a bridge between the modern
man and nature. The gardens of Taipei, these acupuncture points, are
penetrating through the industrial surface of the city and reaching the original
ground. The self organized
community gardens are the urban acupuncture needles of Taipei. Local Knowledge
is in connection with the first generation city, when the built human
environment was dependent on nature and regulated by nature. Now the anarchist
gardeners are regulating the industrial city.      Dominate the no-man's landThe community
gardens are taking over abandoned construction sites and ruined housing areas,
empty city-blocks waiting for development, flood banks of the rivers and even
grave-yards out of fashion. In many cases the gardens are flourishing on spots
of land where the land-owner issues are unsettle or complicated. Sometimes the
garden will stay in the spot for only a couple of years, as in the cases of
soon to be developed areas and sometimes the urban farming has decades long
traditions as with the river flood plains or on the island in-between Zhongxiao
and Zhongshing bridges. The smaller urban farms are flexible and eager to
overtake the empty spots of the city, eager to dominate the no-man's land.One of the more
famous urban farming communities of Taipei was the Treasure Hill settlement,
originally an illegal community of KMT veterans. During its legitimating
process Treasure Hill became so famous that eventually the original community
was kicked away by the city government and the houses were taken over by
artists and art related organizations. All the farms were destroyed on the
process. Sounds like urban warfare against urban acupuncture. Treasure Hill was
powerful and self-sustained when it was illegal. The community built its own
houses and its own farms and it made its own rules. The official city wanted to
eliminate this unofficial organic rival. NGOs found the issue sexy and stepped
in to protect and legitimize the settlement. In the end the NGOs and artists
took over the now-famous community and hooked up with the city government. The
original urban farmers didn?t fit the picture anymore and had to leave. Now you
can listen gansta-rap in a yellow plastic tent where the gardens used to be.
Local knowledge died.  But Treasure Hill
is not alone. Urban farming happens through different social classes and
through out the city. The socially disordered citizens are ready to occupy land
and start the community farms over and over again. Some acupuncture spots get hot and benefit the surrounding
urban tissue while others fade away. The industrial surface of the city keeps
constantly being broken up and herbs and vegetables are planted into the
cracks. People are ruining the
industrial city. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature.
Urban EditorsCompared to
Western cities Taipei plays in quite different rules. The aesthetics of the
city is dominated by the functionality of a big collective machine and the
urban mechanism is constantly being edited and rendered as with changing the
micro-chips or other parts of a super-computer into more powerful ones. The
urban data is people and this is what the machine needs to process. Mostly it
goes smoothly, but also people get viruses ? they get together to spontaneous
demonstrations, they do tai-chi in improvised city-corners, they launch ad-hoc
night markets or under-bridge sales on temporarily occupied streets or city
corners. And they do farms ? they are squeezing organic material into the
machine like a creeper crawling into an air-conditioning box. Why they do this?
Why does the nature want to break the machine?Developers are
the true urban editors. They are linked with the city authorities and necessary
political powers and they make the urban editing. Architects are in a secondary
role ? something like the hyenas after the lions have made the kill. Money is a
good consultant and the generating force of the developer run urban editing
process. This is not urban acupuncture though; it is more like a western style
medical practice ? operations on the body removing, changing or maintaining
parts ? or even plastic surgery. (Oh,
Shanghai has bigger tits than Taipei.) The body is not necessarily seen as
one big organism.In this rough
editing process the anarchist gardeners seem to act as micro-editors, parasites
benefiting of the slow circles of the big-scale development. They occupy the
not so sexy areas of the city and they jump in the more sleepy parts of the
development cycle. For example ? the developer buys a whole city block with
originally many land-owners. The process is slow because he has to negotiate
with all of them. While the process is dragging behind the urban farmers step
in and start farming the area. The developer doesn?t want to cause any more
fuss and let it happen. It takes 3-5 years before the developer has got all the
area to his possession and those same years the site acts as the community
garden. When the actual construction starts the gardeners have already occupied
a next vacant spot in the city.   Third Generation City First generation
city was the human settlement in straight connection with nature and dependent
on nature. The fertile and rich Taipei basing provided a fruitful environment
for such a settlement. The rivers were full of fish and good for transportation
and the mountains protected the farmed plains from the straightest hits of the
frequent typhoons.

The second
generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism claimed the citizen's
independence from nature - a mechanical environment could provide human
everything needed. Nature was seen as something un-necessary or as something
hostile; it was walled away from the mechanical reality.Third Generation
City is the organic ruin of the industrial city. The community gardens of
Taipei are fragments of the third generation urbanism when they exist together
with the industrial surroundings. Local Knowledge is present in the city and
this is where Ruin Academy focuses its research. Among the urban gardeners are
the local knowledge professors of Taipei. Third Generation City is true when the
city recognizes its local knowledge and allows itself to be part of nature.---The
paper is based on independent Ruin Academy research (2010) in co-operation with
the National Taiwan University Department of Sociology. Special thanks to
Professors Yen-Fen Tseng and Chia-Ling Wu, to RA researchers Frank Chen and
Yu-Chen Chiu, to Project Manager Nikita Wu and for Roan Ching-Yueh and Hsieh
Ying-Chun to keep the talk up. The Ruin
Academy research is kindly supported by the JUT Foundation for Arts &
Architecture.