Cooperation of community-based organizations and public sector in culture-led regeneration

Wanhua is a historic district in the old downtown of Taipei City. With developing economic growth, culture-driven strategies had been an important tool for Wanhua to regenerate culture and economy. As a traditional temple fair in Wanhua, Qingshan Festival has been one of the flagship cultural events in this district. More CBOs and public sector have been gradually involved in this event and aim to promote cultural and historical characteristics to young people and other visitors. To understand the collaborative process between public sector and community-based organizations (CBOs) in culture-led regeneration, the author will explore the case of Qingshan Festival in this thesis. The objective of the research is to explore the collaborative process between CBOs and public sector in culture-led regeneration in Wanhua and analyze what outcomes they regenerate to create more/less inclusiveness in this district. Therefore, the research question is in what way CBOs and public sector collaborate in the process of culture-led regeneration in Wanhua? And in what way do these outcomes contributed by their cooperation lead to inclusive culture-led regeneration? The network governance and culture-led regeneration theories will be applied to analyze the independent variable “ cooperation of community-based organizations and public sector ” and the dependent variable “ social outcomes of culture-led regeneration.” The author will use case study strategy with document analysis and semi-structured interview tools to review the development of Qingshan Festival from 2016 to 2020. Overall, the major finding in this research is that boundary spanners play an important role to adjust the relationship in the network governance of Qingshan Festival. Due to the political spectrum difference complex relations among CBOs in Wanhua, there is a demand for boundary spanners to stabilize the network. In this case, public sector takes this position to build up a interaction platform for different CBOs. However, according to the respondents’ comments, although Qingshan Festival provides a chance for them to participate together, interactions with other groups are still not frequent during the collaborative process. Because the hierarchical organizational structure in the collaborative process allows the work distribution done precisely by organizers and hosts, other participants do not need to interact with other groups frequently. The social inclusion and involvement of CBOs and locals in Qingshan Festival needs to be improved, and some respondents observe this problem and agree with this point. When the author conducts this research, it is the first year for Roar Now Bangkah; thus, the collaborative process of CBOs and public sector in the culture-led regeneration in Wanhua is still an interesting topic for further researchers to study in the future.