SPECIAL EDITION
2025/11/11 Tuesday
Botanical Cities Asia Authors: BHAGWAT RUCHIRA, GUO CHURUI, LI KEJIE, WANG MUQING
Taipei Flora Expo: Green Spectacle—or a Withering of the Commons? Fifteen years have passed since the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo, the first of its kind in Taiwan, welcomed nearly nine million visitors. Beyond the glowing media coverage and the beautifully designed expo gardens, however, lay a hidden chapter of public struggle over what ‘sustainability’ truly means. This reflective news piece explores the politics of “urban greening” by examining the contradictions between government-led green spectacles and grassroots guerrilla gardening, which reclaims urban commons to resist neoliberal urbanism and imagine more genuine forms of urban greening.
The 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo (TIFE), held from November 6, 2010, to April 25, 2011, was Taiwan’s first international horticultural Expo. With a total budget of NT$9.51 billion, the expo covered an extensive area of area of 91.8 hectares (0.918 km²), stretching along the southern banks of the Keelung River. Unlike most horticultural expositions, which are generally held in peripheral locations of a city, the Taipei Flora Expo’s unique location in downtown Taipei reflected the Taipei city government’s ambition to capitalize
specific focus on the plant world, promoted sustainability both on-site and citywide. For example, in terms of venue planning, the designers sought to create a “sustainable park” and experimented with rich perennial plant combinations, mixed layering, low-maintenance planting strategies, green roofs, and eco-friendly architecture. The goal was to transform the venue into a laboratory for exploring the potential longterm performance of the landscape, such as offsetting and mitigating future climate and environmental challenges. Nearly 15 years after the closure of the event, this “Green as structure yielded to green as surface.” report investigates the long-lasting socio-ecological implications of the 2010 TIFE. It uncovers not only on the event for city branding and marketing, aiming to boost the prevailing appraisals of the event’s achievements but the international status of Taipei City. also an overlooked chapter related to controversial ideas of Understandably, TIFE was portrayed as a successful event “sustainability.” The mainstream media described how the in both the official report and mainstream media. Situated at event and its carefully designed venue had ignited people’s the intersection of design, horticulture, and technology, the intrigue about sustainable development, allowing the concept of “green cities” to enter public discourse. However, alternative sources of information revealed heated public debates and citizen activism. This socioenvironmental activism scrutinized the politics of greening, or two distinct models of sustainable practice in the city. The controversies over the true meaning of sustainability were observable at multiple scales. An example of this at the venue scale was the Yuanshan MRT station entrance – the city’s main gateway to the Expo. Before construction began on the Taipei Flora Expo, the expanse near the Figure1.The reimagined entrance plaza of TIFE - once a shaded lawn, now a concrete plaza. Base image: intaiwan.net Rendering: Churui Expo’s main entrance of the event was believed to have achieved broader socio-political Yuanshan MRT station was a vast green lawn dotted with tall goals, demonstrating Taiwan’s soft power to nearly nine trees, offering pedestrians a comfortable space to stroll, linger million visitors, both local and international. It was praised and rest. However, during the Taipei Flora Expo, this area for boosting Taiwan’s tourism and flower industries and was redesigned as a primary entrance, and the boundaries of for strengthening cultural-technical exchanges at large. It the recreational green space were redefined to accommodate was also commended for fostering a sense of civic pride, the substantial number of visitors expected to attend the exemplified by the participation of over 30,000 volunteers, a expo. Large trees were felled to create a wider view, and the number unmatched by any previous event in the city’s history. expanses of lawn were cleared and resurfaced into a hardThese media coverages highlighted how the event, with its surfaced plaza. A neat row of saplings provided a clean, 1. Mabon, Leslie, Wan-Yu Shih, and Sue-Ching Jou. “Integration of Knowledge Systems in Urban Farming Initiatives: Insight from Taipei Garden City.” Sustainability Science, 2023. 2. Taipei City Government. Taipei International Flora Exposition: Official Report. Taipei: Taipei City Government and Taipei International Flora Exposition Organising Committee, 2011. 3. Wei, Lily. “Art as Protest, Cooking as Resistance: Everyday Life in Taipei’s Housing Rights Movement.” Lateral 7, no. 2 (2018).
Figure2.Mapping Taipei’s two trajectories of greening — state-led ‘fake parks’ versus community-grown gardens.
Figure3.Sectional drawings showing two faces of urban green: one built for display, the other grown for belonging.
orderly landscape, but the relaxing, cool shade was no more. The entrance now appears tidier and more “international,” but it is noticeably hotter, less relaxing, and less enveloping than before, making it less convenient for the surrounding residents who once used it as a recreational green space(Figure1). The surface green has faded, and the deeper green is slowly disappearing as well. The renovation of Yuanshan Stadium transformed the football field’s grass into a paved plaza with
SPECIAL EDITION flower beds. Even the stadium seats were converted into flower beds. These seasonal flower beds and thin-matrix slope planting look phenomenal in photographs and aerial shots. However, what people do not see is their high dependence on frequent replacement, their lack of ecological structure, shallow root systems, and their inability to create shade; the so-called “green” is merely superficial. In a project promising a “sustainable park,” the disappearance of soil, trees and entire ecosystems, signifies that the “green illusion” they
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proclaim is quietly vanishing. benefits from these initiatives and whether they truly serve Beyond the venues of the Taipei International Flora the city’s environment. Exposition, a more heated debate unfolded across the city. After the Expo, the absence of care for these temporary The controversy centered on how the event accelerated spaces opened opportunities for grassroots action. Individuals urban gentrification through an initiative known as the Taipei and communities began planting where the city had left gaps. Beautiful programme. Rooftops became vegetable gardens. Vacant lots turned into Launched in preparation for the 2010 International flower plots. Residents collaborated with their neighbours to Horticultural Exposition, the programme sought to beautify grow food, add shade, and bring life back to neglected areas. Taipei by creating temporary parks on vacant lots throughout Their projects even mixed art and agriculture. In Treasure Hill, the city. On the surface, this urban renewal initiative claimed for example, an artist collaborated with residents to transform to make the city “greener.” Since 2009, Taipei Beautiful has allowed developers to establish temporary green spaces—socalled “pocket parks”—on plots awaiting redevelopment. The plan promoted greening, public art landscaping, and environmental protection to improve Taipei’s image for international visitors during major events such as the Deaflympics and the Flora Expo. In return, the government promised developers additional floor area bonuses once official construction began. In practice, however, this policy was directly tied to profit. According to city regulations, developers could obtain a floor area reward ranging from 3% to 80% for each project by establishing temporary green spaces, up to a maximum of 10%. In a city where land and housing prices were already Figure5.Activists publicly challenge the Flora Expo and “Beautiful exceptionally high, this policy substantially increased Taipei” as greenwashing, saying that the fake parks were “randomly developers’ profit potential. A single project could yield allocated floor area ratios.” tens or even hundreds of millions of New Taiwan dollars in Source: Facebook additional revenue. Most of these so-called “parks” were little more than fenced lawns, maintained only for the minimum eighteen-month requirement. To date, Taipei has created more than seventy such “temporary parks.”(figure2). Most of them lack genuine design or long-term planning value; some are dismantled once the maintenance period ends, while others exist only on paper, providing no tangible public service. These fenced “parks” were concentrated in prime districts such as Zhongzheng, Zhongshan, and Daan—the city’s most profitable redevelopment zones. Their existence symbolizes the intersection of greening and real estate speculation: greenery became a marketing instrument, increasing nearby Figure6.Citizens reclaiming vacant land through community gardening property values while granting developers additional floor — a quiet resistance to the city’s ‘green illusions.’ Rendering: Churui, Muqing area bonuses. Base image: sallysgreenlife Rendering: Muqing Urban planning experts and civic groups have dubbed this policy “fake park, real volume,” criticizing developers for front yards into edible gardens. These spaces fed people exploiting loopholes to while also strengthening “Visitors saw flowers on display. Citi- community bonds. gain maximum profit with minimal effort. (figure5) zens saw a chance to reclaim their city.” These gardening efforts City Councilor Yang Shiqiu condemned the blanket 10% were both practical and symbolic. They responded directly relaxation of volume control as a clear benefit to real estate to the protests and critiques of the Expo and the fake parks. consortia. “What we need is green, yet all we get is grass,” They highlighted the gap between the city’s green image and remarked one community activist. Fundamentally, this model its real practices. They asked important questions: Who owns transformed public space into a development tool—creating the city’s green spaces? What counts as a park? What is true Rendering: Ruchira not genuine urban green space, but a fleeting “green illusion.” sustainability? People began to see that planting flowers for Temporary parks created under the “Taipei Beautiful” visitors was different from creating a liveable, ecological city. programme are publicly criticized as “green bulldozers,” The legacy of these efforts is still important today. They where making the site look clean overrides everything else. show that citizens can influence how cities develop. They Citizens translated their concerns into tangible actions. suggest that urban agriculture and grassroots gardening can These protests primarily focused on issues relating to complement official urban planning. The Flora Expo may environmental destruction, budget misuse, and inequities in have presented Taipei to the world, but the protests and small urban development. As an alternative to the government’s gardens that followed revealed what a truly green city could fake parks, citizens experimented with community gardening look like. on vacant land in the city. The attempt was to shift from The two trajectories of greening, the spectacular and the short-term vanity projects to urban greening and sustainable everyday, remain intertwined in Taipei’s urban landscape development with long-lasting impacts. It also aimed to today. They remind us that ecological imagination is transform top-down, government-led renewal into bottom- never neutral but always entangled in the production and up, community-driven initiatives with government support redistribution of power. (Figure5). Perhaps fifteen years later, we can finally respond to the After the Taipei Flora Expo ended, its landscape quickly question once hidden behind the Flora Expo: what does true faded. Flower walls wilted and the temporary gardens and sustainability mean? True sustainability is not a future that “fake parks” are overgrown. The spectacle of the Flora Expo can be engineered into existence, but an ongoing negotiation vanished, but in the empty spaces it left behind, citizens began and redefinition between human and ecological systems. It acting. They turned abandoned lots, riverbanks, rooftops, calls for rejecting the use of green as a tool for economic and schoolyards into small patches of green. Some planted growth or urban branding and instead restoring it as a medium herbs and vegetables, others grew flowers. These gardens of social coexistence. In this sense, sustainability is not the were small, informal, and sometimes unauthorized. But they result of urban planning but a process that must be practiced carried meaning (Figure6). and questioned in everyday life. Even before the Expo ended, citizens had protested what The Taipei Flora Expo shows that when green is used to they called “Beautiful Taipei.” Activists criticized the city for construct an urban image, it becomes detached from its prioritizing appearances over real ecology. They argued that ecological context and turns into an ornament of power. the Expo destroyed mature Yet when green returns “True resilience lies in everyday urban trees, paved public spaces, and to people’s hands, to created temporary parks that gardens, not short-lived international spectacles.” rooftops, to reclaimed were more about spectacle vacant lots, and to small than sustainability. Demonstrations and petitions highlighted community gardens, it regains its ethical depth and public Figure4.Government spectacle versus community care — contrasting visions of what it means to green a city.now a concrete plaza. the tension between flashy urban projects and the everyday meaning. It is through these modest acts that ecology and needs of residents. The protests raised questions about who society begin to reconnect. When green is controlled, it becomes a political decoration. 4. Hou, Jeffrey. “Governing Urban Gardens for Resilient Cities: Examining the ‘Garden City Initiative’ in Taipei.” Urban Studies 57, no. 7 (2020): When it is shared, it becomes a public possibility. The story of 1398–1416. 5. Google. “Taipei – Custom Map.” Google My Maps. Accessed November 7, 2025. Taipei reminds us that sustainability is never a complete goal 6. Fake Park. “Photos.” Facebook Page. Accessed November 7, 2025. but a continuing political practice. 7.Good House News. “‘Taipei Looks Great’ – Fake Parks Let Developers Really Make Money.” Good House News, 2013. Accessed November 7, 2025.