Free Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Page A

attract. Conventional shops persist in renting out the space to vendors because their presence is considered beneficial to the market as a whole. Moreover, shops located in the upper levels of the shopping centers may send their salesclerks downstairs to display merchandise on the streets, and shops on the ground level may also display their merchandise on the arcades and sidewalks, blurring the line between street vending and conventional shops.
    The marketing of places on the global stage requires the production of differences. The development plan attempted to engineer New Kujiang into a different place through adopting elements of pedestrian malls in “advanced” countries. Street vendors in New Kujiang, however, propose that, to stand out in the global market of places, New Kujiang needs to stress its local features. Well educated and politically savvy, Mr. Hong’s daughter Yuki has emerged as a proponent for vendors’ right in New Kujiang. Working with local politicians, cultural workers, and local scholars, she hopes to organize vendors to bargain for business licenses and legal status. In her view, international tourism provides the best opportunity for New Kujiang, and the only way to attract foreign tourists is through emphasizing New Kujiang’s local Taiwanese character. She envisions New Kujiang as a place that offers up homey food and exotic items to tourists: “We can’t compete unless we find our own distinctive feature (
tese
).” She argues, “What can be more Taiwanese than street vending?” Although Yuki considers street vending as distinctively Taiwanese, her argument in fact resonates with the global trend of using street vending in the transformation of urban space into pleasure zones for consumption (Donovan 2008; Shepherd 2008). Street vending is promoted as a way to enliven dull streets and give cities a nostalgic as well as a generic aura of urbanism. Because New Kujiang is an important location in the city’s tourism promotion and street vendors contribute to the “hot and noisy” ambience of a place for shopping, their existence is quietly accepted but never encouraged by the government authorities. As street vending has come to epitomize an authentic Taiwanese culture that can distinguish it in the global tourism market (S-D. Yu 2004), Yuki and the vendors have also learned to adopt this narrative, willing to subsume themselves under more regulations but also insisting on continuing customary practices incommensurable with official visions of modernization. Competition in the global market of places is a reason offered both by the planning agencies to eliminate street vending and by the vendors to argue for their continuing presence. In stressing competitiveness and profit seeking, the official narrative inadvertently provides a ready vocabulary for local venders to persist in evading, bending, breaking, or neglecting regulations.
    The islandwide place-making projects have reconfigured local marketplaces and urban streets for capital in the form of investment and consumption. In these increasingly standardized places striving to present both modern qualities and local distinctiveness, the signs of “Taiwanese-ness” are being repackaged into a desired commodity (Wu and Kuo 2001). It is within this same framework that New Kujiang’s streets have been reordered to signify national progress and global connectivity and that Yuki has strategically manipulated the idioms of competitiveness and global market to advance her agenda. Images of urban space constructed by designers and political elites are “rarely consistent with the daily spatial experience of urban residents and workers” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2006: 20). “Through people’s social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material settings,” space is transformed into “scenes and actions that convey symbolic meaning” (Low 1996: 862). Designed to be a space that resembles the cosmopolitan shopping streets