2016 Volume 81 Issue 729 Pages 2463-2473
This study focuses on the welfare-oriented machizukuri (community empowerment) experience in housing complex community in Taiwan. We pick up Nanchichang community, a resettlement housing community in Taipei city as case study. First we indicate some critical issues and reveal the reason why it became a socially disadvantaged community today. Then, using research methods like site survey and interview survey, we research about the condition of welfare-oriented machizukuri and analyze how it has been conducted by the local community.
In the case of Nanchichang community, they established two community welfare facilities by revitalizing old abolished facility. The design and construction were realized by community-participated approach. Today, Community bank and Community food bank provide several welfare supports for disadvantaged households in the community. Our focus is about to analyze “resource”, “human resource”, “institution” and “organization” has been utilized during each process of establishing these two facility.
According to our research, we consider that the process of establishing these two facilities might be divided into three: (1) infrastructure construction period; (2) institution establishment period, and (3) independent operation period. In the first period, the community depends on public subsidy or external resource mainly. In the second stage, they try to build up institution and organization for independent operation for the next stage. Finally, they succeed on conducting various welfare services almost independently from external support.
We propose some important applications and key factors as following for operating welfare-oriented machizukuri in housing complex community, especially socially disadvantaged community like Nanchichang through this case analysis:
1. Their welfare support emphasizes educational support, which helps children from disadvantaged household to get better education which was not available from them before.
2. They combine “community currency” system in community food bank with the service in community land, this make it possible for disadvantaged household to help others rather than only accepting support or help from others.
3. Self-sufficient model is established for sustainable and independent operation by the community. This empowers the community to support not only the local people, but also more disadvantaged people and household outside the community somedays.
