I have lived in Taiwan for over a decade, not only teaching and practising landscape architecture but also conducting what some call anthropological field research on the local environmental design scene.

During this time, I have witnessed a recurring pattern in the development of the built environment—especially in landscape projects. A public work is launched with great ambition, only to be quickly met with mounting criticism and controversy. After opening day, the project enters an endless cycle of patching, repairing, justifying, and moving on. The renowned Taichung Central Park, aka Phase Shifts Park, aka Jade Eco Park,^[1] stands out as one prominent example of this sad script.

If we want to evaluate what happens fairly, anyhow, I believe we should look beyond searching for looming villains and examine instead the “subtle habits” that silently shape governance. When Taiwanese officials debate a controversial public work, this is not primarily judged by performance, at least not in the experimental, outcome-driven sense championed by environmental design in the Western disciplinary discourse. More often, it is assessed according to something else, that is, what I call “appropriateness”. By this, I do not mean the minimum quality, the lack of ambition, or any inability to appreciate innovation. Rather, I refer to a distinctive solution to the challenges of institutional defensibility, facing all the procurement routines, audits, council scrutiny, and common-sense expectations of what a project should be.

photos: Rhys Williams, 2025

Through the following discussion, I hope to make a twofold contribution to the disciplinary debate at the time of decolonial discourse. First, I want to suggest that controversies in landscape and public space development may stem from conflicts between performance-based promises and appropriateness-based trust. Second, that procedural transparency and scientific accountability cannot be considered the ultimate criteria used for evaluating and guiding the development of the built environment. Anyhow, since the story of Taichung Central Park makes the mismatch between performance-based promises and appropriateness-based trust unusually visible, I will use it to unpack how institutional defensibility and landscape or public space developments are correlated within a non-Western context, such as that of Taiwan.

This essay is grounded in my decade-long field research and involvement in more than thirty public projects in architecture, landscape architecture, and public art—across bidding phases, procurement, development, construction, supervision, and public debates—sometimes as a responsible party, sometimes as a consultant or a collaborator. This proximity has given me access to the mundane details that shape the local governance in practice—how documents are written, risk allocated, how committees speak, and how accountability is performed.

At the same time, this perspective is based on recurring patterns observed in professional and public discourse around major projects, rather than any claim about an objective “national character.” Alternative interpretations remain possible, although trust-building remains a relevant aspect.

Taichung Central Park was conceived following an international competition in 2011,^[2] won by the French landscape firm Mosbach Paysagistes and architect Philippe Rahm, with Ricky Liu & Associates Architects + Planners as local architect.^[3] Their innovative proposal sought to transform Taichung’s hot, humid climate by creating a series of microclimates within a 67-hectare park on the former Shuinan Airport site. The park was intended to anchor the development of the new Taichung Gateway District and received an initial planning and construction budget of NT$2.7–3.4 billion.^[4]

The international design community immediately praised the innovative, climate-driven concept. However, Taiwanese professionals soon voiced scepticism about whether the foreign approach would meet local needs. Environmental advocates questioned the design’s ecological authenticity, raising concerns that it might contradict ecological principles despite being locally promoted as a world-class ecological park. Urban planners also lamented missed opportunities. For example, some noted it was unfortunate that the old runway wasn’t preserved as a distinctive linear space—a feature that could have honoured the site’s history.

Design development and early critiques (2013–2016)

During the design development phase, Taiwanese experts urged the city to adapt the design to local principles. In mid-2014, local academics organised reviews and stressed that Taichung’s native forest ecosystem should serve as the blueprint. They argued that, regardless of the foreign designers’ reputation, creating an ecological park required local knowledge. It was also noted that the city had held no extensive public participation or local expert consultation, instead relying on the foreign team’s world-class reputation to justify a largely closed-door process. This dismissive approach was criticised, and quickly eroded public trust in the administration.

Specific design elements drew heavy fire. The most controversial was the proposed ground cooling system.^[5] Despite technical justification, local environmentalists derided it, calling it a wasteful use of energy. To power the system, the plan included a 7,000 sqm solar panel farm,^[6] which critics saw as a publicity stunt for renewable energy at the expense of green space. Ultimately, the design was labelled irrational. The public outcry grew so loud that the City Hall had to express willingness to revise the plan, though officials later argued that the project’s contractual commitments made major changes almost impossible.

The city’s inflexibility frustrated many Taiwanese observers, who expected a more flexible/adaptive approach to governance. As political leadership changed, the incoming administration promptly moved to revise the design. The new Mayor established a special “tree committee” to review the planting strategy. In a controversial decision, such a committee prioritised native tree species over the large, semi-mature exotic trees originally planned. As a result, many young native trees were planted in place of the fewer big-canopy trees initially specified. While ecologically motivated, this choice had significant short-term consequences: it provided much less immediate shade, leading to widespread complaints after the park opened that the trees were too small and the park too hot. Meanwhile, the construction of the cooling systems and related facilities was halted, even though some had already been built. Consequently, the city had to pay contractors approximately NT$50 million in cancellation fees.^[7]

From a design-integrity perspective, these changes meant the completed park diverged significantly from the original vision. The designers had imagined immediate, lush shade in designated cool zones and a seamless integration of technology and landscape to mitigate heat. Instead, the finished park featured mostly young plantings and lacked the planned high-tech climate devices. This gap between competition vision and the realised project became a focal point for professional criticism, with some arguing it exposed a failure to reconcile innovative design with practical realities—especially amid shifting political leadership.

Execution issues and public reception (2020–2021)

Taichung Central Park officially opened in late 2020, and local media initially hailed it as the city’s new landmark. However, within weeks, public enthusiasm faded as visitors encountered practical problems. Lacking the originally planned mature tree canopy, the park felt exposed and bare. Large lawns and trails offered little shade, and the intended strategy of alternating microclimates was lost. Most visitors found the park inhospitable, while Taiwanese landscape designers criticised the design as a misreading of the local climate.

Many of the much-publicised sensory interactive installations were neither ready nor functional at the park’s opening. By late 2021, they had essentially become storage sheds, and some lamented that these “high-cost experience facilities” had turned into mosquito breeding grounds. Users and local media reported several physical issues, pointing to rushed construction and poor quality control. Walkers noted uneven paving, with gaps in tiled paths that caught the children’s feet. Minimal barriers around water features caused safety concerns, and park amenities deteriorated rapidly. Public restrooms became notorious for leaking ceilings and poor cleanliness.^[8]

photos: Rhys Williams, 2025

Political controversies

The contentious reception of Central Park inevitably raised questions about costs and accountability. The park’s development was expensive, with roughly NT$3.3 billion spent on planning and construction. Maintenance costs for such a large, feature-rich park also proved high. These figures drew scrutiny from city councillors and auditors throughout the project’s life.

Unsurprisingly, at opening, the park became a political battleground. New officials blamed inherited problems, while the predecessors claimed they had already implemented necessary changes. Such a political back-and-forth well underscores how the park’s design and implementation became mired in Taiwan’s partisan rivalries.

Beyond city politics, national oversight bodies also intervened. In 2022, the National Audit Office issued a report. In late 2023, two members of the Control Yuan visited Taichung to examine the park’s facilities and upkeep.^[9] While their report ultimately raised concerns to improve accessibility and enhance maintenance, the visit alone signalled that the park’s troubles had reached the level of central oversight.

More recently, a major anchor like the Taichung Central Library Complex finally opened on the site, helping to draw more people to the park.^[10] In the interim, the park was often rented out for several public events, prompting some to grumble that the city prioritised monetising the space over addressing its persistent issues.

Ongoing improvements

As of 2025, Taichung Central Park remains a work in progress. On weekends, families spread out on the lawns, cyclists loop the paths, and children cluster at the play areas—then drift again, in search of shade. Many of the park’s earliest criticisms were mundane in exactly this way: too hot, too exposed, too unfinished. Shade sails have been added around playgrounds and seating areas to mitigate heat, and additional trees have been planted to increase canopy cover.^[11] The pavilions have been offered to private operators, and regular events—such as runs, festivals, and outdoor exhibitions—are held to activate the park. As a result, visitor numbers are on the rise.

Still, Taiwanese architects and scholars note that this case highlights the risks of disconnection between any imported design and the local realities. Local professionals argue that truly successful public spaces in Taiwan require blending innovative design with practical, context-sensitive solutions. While this sentiment underpins many criticisms, budget overruns and ongoing controversies also underscore persistent governance challenges—making the project a sensible cautionary tale in recent Taiwan’s urban development discourse.

Although the case should not be oversimplified, Taichung Central Park is frequently viewed as a local familiar disappointment: a project launched with global ambitions, delivered with conspicuous imperfections, and ultimately absorbed into Taiwan’s recurring pattern of post-handover troubleshooting. In this narrative, blame is easily assigned—the foreign designers are labelled as too theoretical, the government incompetent, the contractor greedy, the public overly demanding. Everyone recognises the plot, but the story remains incomplete. It explains what happened, but not why such outcomes often occur in Taiwan—especially with major landscape projects.

However, a different—though slightly uncomfortable—perspective is possible: the park became a challenging case not only because of complex design and sloppy execution, but because Taiwanese society and administration tend to evaluate public works based on appropriateness or trust—even as everyone outwardly insists that science, evidence, and professional evaluation guide decisions. This is not a moral accusation, but an institutional diagnosis, informed by my long-term investigation. Such a view may also provide a fairer basis for asking who, exactly, bears responsibility when a project like this goes off track.

The park as a design innovation

Mosbach Paysagistes did not propose a conventional park. Instead, they envisioned an “environmental apparatus”—a landscape setup designed to reorganise microclimates by creating cooler, drier, and cleaner-air pockets through landform, planting, water management, and technology. The park’s ambition was not merely to provide paths and lawns, but to assert that design could produce a measurable climatic effect and reclaim the outdoors for a subtropical society.

Such a claim comes with an implicit demand: a park built on the promise of microclimate performance must be evaluated like a research hypothesis—with baselines, indicators, monitoring, and post-occupancy assessment. As with any innovative design work, it is a project and a test, or a piece of design in which innovation must be integrated within its management. This means that plenty of “research questions” were structurally associated with the project and had to be faced by the administration: Does the shade canopy reduce perceived heat stress? Are the surface temperatures measurably lower in intended cool zones? Does the particulate concentration differ with planting patterns? Do water-retention features function during typhoons? How do people use the climatic gradients over the seasons?

In Taiwan, where the local culture and administrative habits empower public officials and consultants together with their procurement protocols and development checks, questions like this make the project inherently difficult, not because it is impossible, but because it demands an administrative/evaluative culture uncommon in the place.

photos: Rhys Williams, 2025

A quiet rule is that appropriateness is way better

In Taiwanese public procurement dynamics, the word “science” is often more a badge than a method. Everyone wants a project to appear rational, evidence-based, and expert-led, but within the machinery of delivery, decisions hinge on appropriateness—adherence to customary practices and familiar forms.

It is important to emphasise that appropriateness is not stupidity, but instead a strategy for managing uncertainty. When outcomes are hard to predict—or the capacity to measure them is lacking—institutions gravitate toward what seems safe. In Taiwan, this means relying on established standards, conventional palettes, familiar typologies, and routines that can be defended if something goes wrong. Appropriateness creates a particular kind of trust: not that a project will be optimal, but that it will be defensible.

As a result, in many Taiwanese public projects, the central question of the administration can shift from “will it perform?” to “will it pass?”—that is, pass procedures, audits, council scrutiny, and the common-sense expectations of what a park should be. The effect is subtle: even for internationally designed projects, the system tends to treat them as conventional public works packages that need to be completed according to established norms.

Taichung Central Park collided head-on with this. Its most important values were not the easiest to defend on the grounds of customary appropriateness. Microclimate gradients are difficult to explain in a council session, and the label “ecological park” served more to make the concept palatable than to convey the design’s true intentions.

Anyhow, the project’s values are not far removed from those of many other landscape architecture efforts, which means landscape projects often collide with the local societal and administrative expectations. For example, a grove intended to mature over decades can look a failure on opening day; to an untrained eye, a carefully calibrated wetland may appear as either an engineering mishap or a neglected pond. When “dynamics of research” cannot be embedded in political and administrative processes to build trust, many aspects of landscape architecture—no matter how much forward-thinking—become vulnerable to dismissal as superfluous.

The expectation of professional judgement

There is another facet to this: professional evaluation—whether aesthetic, ecological, or operational—is often expected rhetorically, but in practice is treated as ornamental. Officials and consultants may publicly defer to professionals—the “the designers know best” leitmotif—while simultaneously constraining them through procurement rules, risk aversion, and entrenched standards.

In Taiwan, this dynamic is especially acute in landscape architecture, though it also exists in architecture. The difference is that architecture comes with extensive institutional scaffolding and produces artifacts meant to remain as delivered—i.e., static objects. Landscape, by contrast, is a living, evolving system: it persists through time and weather, composed of people, organisms, soil, water, and maintenance routines. Its completion is never final. This makes it both powerful and politically precarious—it requires ongoing care and attention, but such sustained commitment is precisely what short political cycles struggle to provide. As a result, major innovations or qualitative improvements in the landscape become difficult to achieve.

In this context, the professional’s role is often reduced to producing compelling images and deliverables. Once a project enters the administrative pipeline, the logic can quickly shift to “will it be safe? Will maintenance be easy? Will complaints be manageable?” If not, design is “quietly” simplified, deferred, or reinterpreted. Public scrutiny follows the same logic, intensifying administrative pressures over any design.

This perspective offers a more “charitable” explanation for the turmoil surrounding Taichung Central Park and similar projects: yes, mayors, councils, and officials have failed to fully grasp the project, not solely due to intellectual shortcomings, but because its values could not be easily stabilised within the evaluative frameworks available to them, whether in public administration or public opinion. The logic of the happenings is straightforward: if a design’s meaning cannot be administratively anchored, it becomes politically risky; risk encourages simplification; simplification is often fatal to quality outcomes, especially for nuanced projects like those of landscape architecture.

Budget constraints are a symptom, not a cause

Some argue that the park’s failure was due to penny-pinching, but this explanation is incomplete. In reality, underfinancing reflects the local “trust economy.” Socio-political systems fund what they can defend. They defend what they can explain. In Taiwan, they explain what fits customary categories, given that these feed the local “trust economy.”

A park designed as an “environmental apparatus” needs budgets that are not larger, but differently structured. Ongoing monitoring, specialised horticulture, maintenance of sensitive installations, long-term adaptation, and public communication that translates invisible performance into visible legitimacy are all essential. If these elements are not institutionally normalised, they are quickly dismissed as extras—nice-to-have rather than necessary—and thus the first to be “value-engineered” away. Ironically, these are not luxuries, but quite fundamental to any landscape architecture project, although they were more than crucial in the case of Taichung Central Park.

This is how a globally ambitious project can fall into a paradox: possessing a state-of-the-art concept, only to see it compromised in execution, and then having that compromised execution used to retroactively justify budget cuts. That is, the project is punished for failing to deliver qualities it was never given the means to enact.

Trust doesn’t come from appropriateness only

In the case of Taichung Central Park, another key factor is the designer’s nationality and cultural trust associated with certain countries in the local imagination. This is a delicate point, but it matters. Japanese architecture and design, for example, carry not only prestige but also an aura of reliability, craftsmanship, and cultural proximity. By contrast, European designers—especially those with conceptual rhetoric—may be admired but also viewed with suspicion, seen as brilliant yet impractical or producing theoretical work that local government finds difficult to operate. These stereotypes matter: when robust measurement is lacking, reputation and origin become proxies for performance. Consider the Taichung Central Library Complex, designed by a renowned Japanese architect—its funding expanded without major challenge, and it is now widely praised.

So, we might say that trust is a composite and can be made by several things, including appropriateness (the project looks and works like familiar successes), author’s fame (a renowned name is its own guarantee, since difficult to critique), provenance (the designer’s origin brings imported values), and project type (“objects,” like museums, are more readily accepted). This point is especially important in comparing landscape architecture projects to architecture or temporary installations. Museums may have underused spaces, and public events can be only moderately successful, yet both are tolerated; by contrast, parks and public spaces are expected to be “useful and sober” immediately, in daily life, and then year after year. With this framework, it’s easier to see why Taichung Central Library Complex is celebrated despite ambiguous spaces: it exists in a “trust-rich envelope”—famous author, esteemed origin, familiar typology. Taichung Central Park, by contrast, occupies a “trust-poor envelope”—landscape is less revered, the project type is harder to define, and its conceptual language did not translate into the everyday politics of the city.

The question of justice

If trust shapes how projects are managed, then project evaluation must also evolve. It is unjust to blame designers for a park that was never allowed to be evaluated on its own terms. Likewise, blaming a single Mayor or council member overlooks the reality that administrations inherit contracts, public sentiments, and financial structures built before their tenure. It’s too simplistic to scapegoat contractors, who operate within incentive systems defined by tenders and supervision regimes. Nor is it fair to fault the public for lacking the tools to digest the project. A more just evaluation needs to ask: at what points did the “trust economy” override project development, and who benefited?

In light of this, several moments may warrant scrutiny. Was the project chosen as a prestige symbol rather than a genuine commitment to innovation? If so, turmoil was seeded from the outset. Were ecologists, maintenance experts, and users integrated into design, or merely brought in for ceremonial review? When evaluation is only “performative,” complex projects are set up to fail. Was the park funded and staffed as an evolving landscape system, or treated as a static object? A living park without a living budget inevitably deteriorates and then is blamed for deteriorating. Through this lens, responsibility lies less with individuals and more with the whole social, cultural, and administrative structures.

Why landscape?

Landscape is uniquely vulnerable because it involves things—people, nature, infrastructure, administration, and management—unfolding over time and space. It rarely produces immediate, tangible results: trees grow slowly, soil improves quietly, microclimates are subtle, and ecological benefits accrue gradually and are hard to narrate. Unless society and administration commit to long-term management, monitoring, and public interpretation, landscape projects are judged primarily by the immediate appearance. This makes early years critical: a young canopy appears “too hot,” a deliberately sparse area feels “empty,” a stormwater meadow looks “messy.” The right approach would treat these as part of a planned temporal sequence and provide public interpretation and education about this. Instead, appropriateness-driven systems treat them as reputational risk to be managed, often adding conventional elements, over-programming, or retreating into maintenance minimalism.

The key now is to learn from these events. If we want to fairly evaluate Taichung Central Park to prevent similar outcomes in the future, the solution is not simply “more money” or “better designers.” The true remedy lies in fostering a socio-political environment where alternative forms of trust are viable: early-publication of performance indicators, independent and diagnostic post-occupancy evaluations, integrated funding and maintenance, translating invisible outcomes into public narratives, treating international design teams as a partnership rather than a trophy, and ensuring local routines do not dilute innovation into mediocrity.

However, the point is not to romanticise scientific rigour, transparency, or good governance as flawless solutions to the challenges of real-world politics. Trust will always be essential, and decisions will inevitably be made under uncertainty. The deeper lesson is that when trust is built primarily on appropriateness, celebrity, stereotypes, or familiar typologies, complex public projects are destined to be oversimplified—ultimately leading to disappointment.

From this perspective, I repeat myself, searching for a single culprit is misplaced. The social system as a whole expects professionals to deliver excellence, yet lacks the means to recognise, protect, and sustain it when it arrives. No city—mayors, councils, administrators, and citizens included—can truly pursue excellence if it relies on systems built for customary appropriateness.

If this is especially true in landscape, a critical area of governance in the era of climate change, unfortunately, the associated risks can go well beyond disrupting the quality of the built environment. The pressure to appear “appropriate” does not stop within the governance; design firms themselves can well internalise it. Over time, appropriateness becomes a professional survival strategy: offices learn to optimise for what can pass audits, withstand council scrutiny, and meet the common sense. Innovation is not openly rejected—instead, it is quietly reframed as a liability, and design practice drifts away from opening up alternatives for a better life of the collectivity. In my view, this is the real threat we must guard against, that is, professionalism becoming the reproduction of appropriateness.

Yet, this critique should not be mistaken for a wholesale dismissal of Taiwan’s approach. The same governance structures that constrain innovation can also produce forms of trust that technocratic systems often struggle to achieve.

References

The photographic survey accompanying this article is by Rhys Williams, Landscape Architecture Program Director, UTS – University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and was carried out for academic purposes in the second half of April 2025.