Contract Manufacturing | 洲子街12號, 內湖, 26 December 2001 — Zoned for Car Repair, Filled With Head Offices

This building exists because the tenants demanded it. Companies filling up the industrial zone found nobody to ask about land use, factory registration or business licensing, and lobbied the city for a single office that would handle all of it. It stands on 洲子街 in a district that was zoned, in 1969, for car repair shops and small metalwork. That designation was 內湖輕工業區, about 129 hectares of light industry on paper. Nothing was built on it for twenty years. Before that 內湖 was farmland, brick kilns and coal. The gazetteer of the district describes what followed as going from water buffalo to computer mouse, which is roughly accurate and slightly too pleased with itself. The ground was cleared by a river. Work to straighten the 基隆河 began on 11 November 1991, and the sixth-phase land readjustment that came with it flattened the old street markets at 港墘 and 北勢湖. What was supposed to fill the cleared land was second and third class industry: vehicle repair, metal products, machinery, printing. What arrived instead were 廠辦 towers, a Taiwanese building type whose name means factory-and-office and which is mostly office. The first tenant opened on 5 March 1996 and the towers went up in a decade. The rules were rewritten to match. The city loosened the permitted-industry list in 1999, and in 2002 approved the use that decided the district's character: corporate headquarters. The numbers moved accordingly. By the end of 2003 the park held around 1,758 companies turning over more than NT$1.16 trillion; by 2016 that was NT$4.09 trillion and 156,808 people; by April 2019, 5,996 registered firms on land 95 per cent built out, inside 149.72 hectares. Here is what matters for anyone reading this collection. 仁寶電腦 at 瑞光路581號 and 華寶通訊 at 陽光街385號 both sit inside this boundary, and neither of them builds anything here. The laptops and the telephones were assembled in 崑山, in 重慶, in Vietnam, in Poland, in Brazil. What 內湖 holds is the design work, the purchasing, the arguing with customers and the accounts. An industrial zone that was drawn for machine shops became the head office of an industry whose hands are in other countries. That is not a failure of the plan. It is what happened to manufacturing, expressed as a zoning map. The park is ordinary public streets, walkable from 港墘 or 西湖 on the Wenhu line, and the service building at 洲子街12號 is a working government office rather than anything to tour. The cover photograph shows that building in February 2010, with the vertical sign down the corner. The second image is the district itself on the winter solstice of 2015, looking along 堤頂大道: glass towers on one side, the 基隆河 and its flood wall on the other, and the hills behind. Photos: KaurJmeb, public domain; Meow, CC BY-SA 4.0; both via Wikimedia Commons.