Is Taipei an Innovative City? An Institutionalist Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores whether Taipei is an innovative city by critically examining Taipei's industrial and economic performance, developmental visions and spatial planning, as well as institutional settings and political contexts. With the aid of institutionalist perspective, the author argues that Taipei's innovative efforts are mostly policy innovation, rather than institutional innovation. The author also describes the institutional dynamics that have caused the lack of Taipei's institutional innovation. The case study of Taipei could be helpful in conducting comparative studies on urban innovation. PrefaceThrough an institutionalist analysis, this paper intends to investigate whether Taipei as a semi-peripheral world city is an innovative city by examining secondary data and by conducting a series of short interviews. This paper is based on two research motives. First, a number of studies of and debates revolving around world cities/global cities have demonstrated that an institutionalist analysis is indispensable in relevant case studies and comparative analyses. The paradigm of world cities/global cities has revealed the macro structure of the world city system embedded in and intertwined with the globalizing and incessantly evolutionary capitalist system [42], but it has been indicated that the contexts and embeddedness of the cities being studied are important, too [14,45,46]. This suggests that an institutionalist analysis is necessary to better understand the institutional dynamics of and structuring effects on various world cities because an institutionalist analysis is