Rethinking Decentralized Managerialism In The Taipei Shilin Night Market

This paper develops the concept of decentralized managerialism to examine the municipal policies regulating the Taipei Shilin Night Market. The concept highlights the roles of managerial autonomy and political-economic structures previously overlooked by urban managerialism. The process of decentralization evolves mainly over two stages - self-management and private management. By organizing self-managed alliances, street vendors appropriated public and private property by dealing with the municipality and local community in legal and extralegal situations in ways that supported their operations. The municipality compromised vendors' self-management by demanding that they be licensed and registered and by building a new market. The stage of private management begins when the municipality officially permits vending in a district by requiring vendors to rent storefront arcades from a community alliance made of local property owners that allocate vending units. In the name of reallocating pre-existing extralegal street vendors, the project privileges property owners’ profits over street vendors’ needs for space. Field research has found that most unlicensed vendors continue occupying streets even after they are provided with legitimate vending units; five retailers in the business improvement district have rejected the arcade allocation plan by mobilizing their own social network. Shoppers continue trading with vendors outside of the district. These results suggest that self-management as a decentralization strategy is more effective than private management in terms of governing urban informality. In the case of private management, community activism sugarcoats pro-development, business-centered place-making, as the proprietors dominate neighborhood affairs management and rule the streets. Proprietors’ private control replaces administrative management to the extent that a democratic, effective, and fair vending space allocation is unrealized. The findings help redefine urban managerialism as something more than a resource allocation strategy, as a philosophy for managing peoples’ rights to the city and their shared urban experience, which sustains an all-inclusive city