City-like Settlement to Industrial City: A Case of Urban Transformation in Huwei Township

Abstract

[EN] City-like Settlement (German: Teilweise Stadtähnliche Siedlungen) (Schwarz, 1989; Sorre, 1952) plays an important role in the course of civilization, especially the development of industrial cities. Accordingly, this study utilizes Town-Plan Analysis (Conzen, 1960) to deconstruct the relationships between industrialization and settlement formation in order to illustrate the common origin of cities in Taiwan as a result of the emerging economy at the turn of the 20th century. The industrial city of Huwei, known as the “sugar city” with largest yields of cane sugar in Taiwan, had the largest-scale sugar refinery in pre-war East Asia (Williams, 1980). The city has grown and transformed with the factory during the four phases of morphological periods, which began at the establishment of the sugar refinery and worker housing in the middle of the fertile flooding plain in western Taiwan. The spatial arrangement was directed to operational and management efficiency, characterized by the simple grids and hierarchy of layout along the riverside. As the industry enlarged, the new urban core was planned to support the original settlement with shophouses accumulated in the small grids. Followed by postwar modernism (Schinz, 1989), the urban planning again extended the city boundary with larger and polygonal blocks. In the fourth phase, however, the sugar refinery downsized, leading to the conversion of the worker housing and the merging of the factory and the city that slowly brought to its present shape. The morphological process results in the concentric structure from the sugar refinery, providing valuable references for the preservation of the sugar industry townscape, and unveils the influence of industrialization as well as the special urban development pattern in Taiwan.