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On the 6th of February, 2018, a 6.26 magnitude earthquake resulted in the originally underground stream, henceforth recovered to as ‘Wanshou River’ which originally sat under the ‘Shangxiao Street Precinct’ in Hualien City in Taiwan, to be discovered. This instigated the motivation of this paper’s author to gain an in-depth understanding of the area by coordinating a series of community tour. Through the process of executing these tours, the intention is to consolidate the area’s resources and local cultural features to cultivate them into a possible format of developing the area’s cultural industry.
The literature review of this research investigated topics such as: community development, neighborhood economy, regional revitalization. The ways in which community tour are conducted in other countries around the world were also explored and compared with the existing methods used within Taiwan. From these studies in combination with local socio-historical data, three routes of community tour were derived, aimed at focusing on the ‘Wanshou River’ route in this research paper.
This research scope of this paper focuses on investigating ‘Wanshou River’ and ‘Meilun River’ at their confluence extending to ‘Guohuen Village’, ‘Guolian Village’, ‘Guofang Village’ and ‘Guoan Village’. In the same time of collecting documents, historical materials and maps of different periods, on-site investigations were also carried out alongside conducting interviews with local residents in order to draw parallels and verify their oral data with the historical documents. From this, clues can be given in to how to restore the early appearance of the area as much as possible.
Through GIS Modelling, maps of different eras will be superimposed over each other and remodelled to form an era-transcending map of “The Detailed Drawing of the Shangxiao Street Business Precinct of Hualien City”, in order to clearly convey the differences between the area’s landscape and civilization over time. This is to become the critical foundations of development for coordinating the community tour.
The ultimate short local tour operation aims to identify and generate a database of the community’s socio-cultural make-up to further integrate local businesses in order to form a culturally-conscious operation model. Thus other than focusing on collecting data on the current status of the community, more importantly is to understand the extent of which the community can withstand the influence external factors to their original lifestyle. Specifically, in order for the coordination of the tours to be operable, the relationship between the two notions of the tourist “observing” and “being observed” need to be resolved in order to empower the community members to confidently identify with their own local culture; and not to fall into a routine of “performing their culture for others”. The community tour that arise out of this study can form operational precedents for researchers’ residencies in the future, which involves the generation of: planning methods, implementation methods and historical data documentation. The way in which the life experiences of the community residents can be transformed into the socio-cultural make-up of the community is critical nourishment for both community development and regional regeneration. |