2026 Theses Master's

From Balconies to Riversides, Tracing the Continuum of Housing Informality in Taipei Taiwan

Shih, Jui

Grounded in theories of urban informality, the political economy of housing, and indigenous urbanism, this thesis investigates housing informality in Taipei through a mixed-method approach, including secondary and archival research, policy analysis, field observations, and semi-structured interviews. It seeks to understand how different forms of housing informality take shape across the city and are lived in everyday contexts. The study is empirically anchored by two case studies, which serve to examine how these forms emerge, evolve, and are negotiated over time.

This research argues that housing informality in Taipei is not a binary condition of legality and illegality, but an ongoing continuum, produced, negotiated, and redefined through the interplay of state governance, selective enforcement, and residents’ everyday need for space, affordability, and survival, alongside broader market dynamics. Through the cases of widespread practice of rooftop and balcony extensions within formal residential buildings and Indigenous urbanism in the Xizhou Amis settlement, this thesis traces how decades of state retreat from housing provision, the financialization of real estate, and uneven regulation have prioritized the exchange value of housing over its use value.

Taken together, these cases reveal that informality in Taipei is not uniformly enforced, but continuously managed through selective tolerance, negotiation, and the shifting priorities of urban governance. Beneath this, informality emerges as a necessary response to the structural gap within a housing system that prioritizes capital accumulation over the residents’ everyday needs for a livable and affordable space. Rather than a deviation from urban order, housing informality is a constitutive part of how the city functions, how spaces are claimed, adapted, and contested in the making of urban life.