Heritage trails have been recognized as an important tool and initiative for placemaking. Heritage trails are pathways that connect the built and the natural environments. They celebrate historical, cultural, and ecological features of the communities, offering opportunities for experiencing and interpreting unique urban and rural landscapes. They also provide economic benefits by serving as routes for heritage tourism or rural tourism development that provide authentic experiences in areas with unexploited natural and cultural assets. By connecting point of interests, activities, and attractions, heritage trails have their social and political significance in fostering cooperation and partnerships among local communities. Since 2013, Zuojhen District has been the site area for the Humanistic Innovation and Social Practices (HISP) Project of National Cheng Kung University. The HISP is built around service learning and social innovations as social responsibilities of universities. As one of the depopulated and underserved communities in the water conservation district, this community in rural Tainan presents various challenges in agricultural development, employment, service provision, and local identity. The complex rural issues are difficult to tackle using just university resources. In addition, stand-alone tourism-oriented projects from the government do generate the intended effects. Therefore, the key issue we wanted to address was how physical planning and design could serve the purposes of 1) strategically fostering different types of university engagement and stakeholder collaborations, and 2) adding values and meaningfulness to the existing tourism investments in rural areas. Heritage trails arose to be the critical spatial and social instrument for innovations and collaborations.
This action research project was initiated in 2016 and has continued to evolve collaboratively through a one-year undergraduate planning studio course and a rural regeneration research project since 2017. This project has employed a series of mappings via the Historic Geographic Information System, interviews, field visits, coteaching courses, stakeholder workshops, public presentations, and trail restoration working holidays to experiment and advocate the potentials of heritage trails. As a result, a multi-scalar collaboration has emerged among community organizations, schools, local government, universities, national research institutions, and nongovernmental organizations to enhance the local capability. Several action plans has been initiated by the local and national stakeholders for continuous research, planning, and implementation of heritage trails and others related projects. The project demonstrates the value of planning and design in rural education, heritage preservation, community-based tourism development, and placemaking in rural areas. It also reveals the potential of heritage trails as a significant communal space with shared identities and a platform that promotes collaboration and governance in rural communities.
In the process of expanding the potential benefits of the reconstruction of the Cailiao Fossil Museum in northern Zhoujhen, a student team discovered the pathway of the Taiwan Sugar Railroad by using Historical GIS resources online. In addition to mapping, interviews, field visits, and workshops with local residents, fossil experts and local tourism business has helped to expand the one single railroad trail into a trail system that will cover the Cailiao River fossil archeology site, a sunset trail, the area’s aboriginal (Siraya) museum, and multi-cultural religious facilities.
The final presentation
The fossil eco-museum concept is proposed to utilize the heritage trail system as a way to physically connect the local archeological, cultural, and natural resources. At the same time, the eco-museum concept also applies tourism consumption, such as using the shop and restaurant in the museum as strategic sites to promote local agricultural products. In addition, a management strategy is proposed to further connect the prehistory museums in Tainan (e.g., the National Museum of Taiwan History) to promote Taiwanese prehistory and early-history tourism. This student team provides a comprehensive vision for an area with action plans to involve potential stakeholders in the project implementation.
The final presentation
Situated in the southern part of Zhoujhen, Erliao is a destination known for its beautiful sunrises and the lowest-altitude sea of clouds. It has been promoted as the ideal spot for New Year celebration events in the region. Yet, the crowd of visitors has brought little economic benefit to the local communities except traffics. Applying the concept of territorial expansion via trails, studio students utilized Historical GIS to identify a historical pathway adjacent to the Erliao Sunrise Pavilion. Based on the rich geological assets in southern Zhoujhen, the students proposed the concept of a geopark with a three-trail system that features different themes: Badlands Historic Trail, Siraya Hunting Trail, and Geo Investigation Trail. The system could incorporate southern Zhoujhen into the global geopark network, where the core values are landscape conservation, environmental education, leisure recreation and most importantly, community participation.
The final presentation
The geopark concept can help rethink the benefits for the area and develop an advocacy strategy to create a dialogue with the largest landowner in the region—the Forestry Bureau, which has a strong interest in geopark development in Taiwan. The concept was developed via intensive field trips to the badlands, interviews with local and national government officials from the cultural, tourism, agriculture, and forestry departments, as well as workshops with multiple stakeholders. As an increasingly popular environmental integration approach to trail construction in Taiwan, handmade trails are proposed. These follow the principles used for America’s Appalachian Trail, which advocate the use of materials found onsite for construction and a volunteer-based maintenance. Handmade trails can be a great placemaking tool for heritage preservation of traditional local construction methods, as well as a means for collecting oral history during the trail restoration process. It can also promote a new urban-rural relationship between the volunteers and the local people.
stdio The final presentation
The students’ creative use of Historical GIS to identify historical trails for community-based tourism has drawn the attention of the leading GIS research entity in Taiwan— the Center for GIS in the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica. The research team has been collaborating with the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) to experiment using GIS as a platform for heritage preservation, environmental education, and placemaking, using Zhoujhen as a pilot community GIS district in southern Taiwan. Historical aerial photos were sent as a gift to the Zhoujhen District Office and Zhoujhen High School as an invitation for collaboration. Local GIS workshops are proposed to offer to school principals in the region to use GIS for heritage and environmental education in K-12 classrooms. This project demonstrates the possibility of using historical maps as a way to rediscover the characteristics of a place and restore its cultural heritage and local identity.
左鎮集思網
The final presentation
To reach more potential stakeholders and expand the scope of the collaboration, we invited guest speakers to bring knowledge and expertise for project implementation. Professional organizations such as the Thousand Mile Trail Club and ELIV International Service were invited to share their experiences and to discuss possible collaborations. A field trip to Zhoujhen and trail investigation took place to explore the technicality and potential of cross-organizational collaborations in trail restoration and agricultural development. A working holiday that integrates stakeholder workshops is planned for the up-coming October as an educational tour for stakeholders to discover the trails as a medium to connect them to local assets and to create prototypes of alternative sustainable tourism models.
The final presentation
The heritage trail in southern Zhoujhen served as an important connector between two villages (Erliao and Tsoushan), a religious trail to Neimen, a pathway to a school, and access to livelihood. To research the exact location of the trail and the stories around it, a teaching team in NCKU was formed to offer three courses and collect data from different disciplinary perspectives. A ribbon was designed to represent the restoration of this trail. The gold-purple color theme was abstracted from the famous Erliao sunrise scenery. The total ribbon length is 1/5000 of the trail length, and each color represents topographically the difficulty of the different sections of the trail. It is a ribbon for way-finding (led by local elderly) but also a souvenir to the student volunteers as a symbol of collective memories of this trail restoration effort.
The final presentation
The students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds in the three courses (Humanistic Architecture, Taiwan Medical History, and Social Innovation) used the trail restoration working holiday for data collection and relationship building with the communities. Using heritage trails as a shared space, the students collected information from different perspectives, including landscape and vegetation, architecture, and local economic and medical history. By walking into the local elderlies’ homes, having in-depth conversations with them, and working together on finding trails based on their memories, faculty members and students were able to develop a closer relationship with these elderlies. The colorful ribbon became the symbol of this trail-based social design that records the process of rural heritage preservation in the badland area.
The final presentation of “New Urban-Rural Relationship” studio was designed to combine a poster exhibition, a PowerPoint oral presentation, and a collaborative action workshop led by the instructors. The three projects—two of which involved heritage trails—aimed to expand the existing anchoring area of activities into a strategic site of regional collaboration in tourism and agricultural development to showcase the local identity of badlands. The leader of a local community organization ended the presentation by giving a service award to the students for their time and effort in rural planning. The presentation took place in the District Office with more than 30 representatives from the national government, local municipal government, community organizations, schools, geology specialists, and business communities. .
The final presentation
The historical photos of Zuojhen were used to showcase the collaborative spirit that prevailed in the old times when public facilities were being constructed. Using them as a metaphor, we transformed of the Q/A session of a traditional final presentation into a collaborative action workshop and invited the stakeholders to share their resources and the responsibility of plan implementation. Local stakeholders were invited to present the workshop results as a form of empowerment. Networking and matching of partners and resources were successful during the process to enhance the future social and institutional capacity for co-action and co-creation.
http://mypaper.pchome.com.tw/larkfairy/post/1321982096
(Listed alphabetically) NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY TEAM PLANNIGN STUDIO INSTRUCTORS Hsiu-Tzu Betty Chang Wei-Ju Astor Huang Tai-Shan Hu PLANNIGN STUDIO STUDENTS Hsiang-An Chan Yu-Chen Chang Wei-Ting Chen Yi-Tsang Chen I Chung Li-Ting Chung Yu-Chien Hou Tzu-Hui Lei Chien-Yu Lin Yu-Ning Liu Tse-Han Lu Yi-Kuang Lu Chia-Hao Tsui Pi-Wen Tuan Yen-Sheng Wu Yu-Lin Wu Yuan-I Yang
NCKU FACULTY Sheng-Fen Chien (Department of Architecture) Hung-Bin Hsu (Department of History) Chung-Yen Kuo (Department of Geomatics) Mei-Ling Tsai (Department of Physiology) Yu-Fong Wong (Research Center for Humanities and Social Science) TEACHING/ RESEARCH ASSISTANTS Chi-Yun Lee Jie Lin Yi-Chi Huang PHOTOGRAPHY Yu-Wei Fu
COMMUNITY/REGIONAL LEVEL COLLABORATORS /PARTICIPANTS Cailiao River Tourism Promotion Organization Gongguan Community Association Zuojhen Junior High School Zuojhen Elementary School Zuojhen District Office Zuojhen Presbyterian Church REGIONAL/NATIONAL LEVEL COLLABORATORS /PARTICIPANTS Center for GIS at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (RCHSS) in Academia Sinica ELIV International Service Siraya National Scenic Area Administration Agricultural Bureau, Tainan City Government Cultural Affair Bureau, Tainan City Government Tourism Bureau, Tainan City Government Taiwan Thousand Mile Train Club Taiwan Geoparks Network
FUNDING INSTITUTIONS 2017 College Career Counselling Project, Youth Development Administration, Ministry of Education, Taiwan 2018 Rural Regeneration Innovative Research Project, Soil and Water Conservation Bureau, Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, Taiwan