The concept of “creative clusters” is a hot topic around the world among those with an interest in urban development. The phenomenon is a new force powering the process of urban metamorphosis in Taipei.

The Geography of Creativity, a report published in 2009 by NESTA of the UK, notes that one writer has defined a creative cluster as a place that brings together: (a) a community of creative people who share an interest in novelty; (b) a catalyzing place where people, relationships, ideas, and talents can spark each other; (c) an environment that offers diversity, stimuli, and freedom of expression; and (d) a thick, open, and ever-changing network of interpersonal exchanges that nurture individuals’ uniqueness and identity.

For Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner Liou Wei-gong, a creative cluster calls to mind Darwin’s Paradox in the sense that, if you want to get a feel for the rich creativity of Taipei, you have to venture into the back streets and wander through the creative clusters present there. Their distribution within the city is not unlike that of the coral reefs that fascinated Charles Darwin, who described the reefs as oases in the desert of the ocean. They have the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the sea. This article will take the reader on a virtual tour of some of Taipei’s more enchanting spots.

The creative cluster centered around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station—with accessories shops housed in remodeled old apartment units, the Lovely Taiwan Shop, the SPOT-Taipei Film House, out-of-the-ordinary footwear, and much more—strikes the eye like a brilliant explosion of inventive sparks.

Zhongshan North Road, where one finds strains of American and Japanese culture, is often likened in cultural circles to New York’s Soho district and Tokyo’s Omotesando. Each of these districts has a mix of similar elements—financial institutions, hotels, department stores, and little boutiques. However, Zhongshan North Road has a peculiar charm of its own that derives from its unique past.

This tree-lined avenue presents a microcosm of the history of Taipei City.

During the Japanese colonial period, this avenue was known as Chokushi Road and led to the Taiwan Grand Shrine (present-day Yuanshan). After Taiwan was retroceded by Japan, because Zhongshan North Road linked up the Presidential Office Building, Songshan Airport, and the Shilin Residence of Chiang Kai-shek, it remained an avenue of significance. Many foreign embassies chose to locate there, and it was the most cosmopolitan area in all of Taipei.

In 1950, the United States named Karl Rankin the chargé d’affaires in the office of the US ambassador. Rankin chose an elegant building at No. 18, Zhongshan North Road Section 2 as the site of the US embassy, which opened in 1953. Rankin became the first of six ambassadors to live there.

After the rupture of diplomatic relations with the US in 1979, the Americans left Taiwan and closed down their embassy, but the roaring economy along Zhongshan North Road wasn’t set back in the least. After the former embassy was declared a Class 3 historic site in 1997, the TSMC Education and Culture Foundation made a donation to fund its refurbishing. The site gradually evolved into the SPOT-Taipei Film House, which specializes in showing off-Hollywood films.

In the words of Lee Ching-chih, an associate professor in the Architecture Department at Shih Chien University: “Zhongshan North Road is Taipei’s memory bank.”

The creative cluster centered around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station—with accessories shops housed in remodeled old apartment units, the Lovely Taiwan Shop, the SPOT-Taipei Film House, out-of-the-ordinary footwear, and much more—strikes the eye like a brilliant explosion of inventive sparks.

Leaving the Zhongshan MRT station via exit 2 and walking along Linear Park, one moves through a warren of back streets clustered along the north-south axis of Zhongshan North Road and the east-west axis of Nanjing West Road. The area is packed with people. Here and there one comes across popular coffee shops where people form long lines waiting to get in for a table. Many creative little shops are big favorites with youth and travelers with a cultural bent.

At Earth Tree, a small shop with a tiny courtyard of its own, the clothing, accessories, and dishes on display all feature colors and designs bearing clear signs of their particular national or ethnic origin. Because the proprietor supports the concept of fair trade, the products are all third-world craft items handmade from natural materials. The small pieces of soapstone sculpture from Kenya, for example, are smooth to the touch, and charming in the extreme.

Earth Tree shares its space with another shop called Motherhouse, whose flagship store was established in Tokyo by the young Japanese entrepreneur Eriko Yamaguchi, who decided in 2006 to source handmade jute bags in Bangladesh in an effort to change the lives of people there. The products are high-quality items that go over quite well with Japanese consumers. Her objective was to establish a sustainable economic activity for Bangladesh. The Motherhouse shop near the Zhongshan MRT station in Taipei is the company’s first location outside of Japan. The products on display in the shop—items such as bags, scarves, and wallets made of jute, leather, and silk—feature simple yet fashionable designs.

A nearby establishment called Lovely Taiwan Shop, meanwhile, trains a spotlight on local agricultural products and indigenous handicrafts. Visitors here get a close look at the loving care the makers put into their products, as well as their deep affection for their hometowns. Fine Taiwan Tea, grown by organic farmer Xie Xianhong at Songboling in Mingjian Township, Nantou County, is equally delicious either cold or hot. Then there’s citronella oil from the village of Daniao in Dawu Township, Taitung County. The indigenous residents there use the ancient methods of their ancestors to refine the oil, which can be used to relieve stress and ward off mosquitoes.

The charm of Zhongshan North Road has taken on a lively, raucous note now that young designers and creative shops have moved into the area.

Another shop called In The Playground mainly sells beach sandals, rain boots, fashionable sports shoes, and other such items, always featuring brilliant colors and busy patterns. The brassy colors and designs, combined with the shop’s teeter-totter seats, stationary merry-go-round, funhouse mirror, and freight elevator decorated to look like a robot, make for a very playful atmosphere.

The creative cluster centered around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station—with accessories shops housed in remodeled old apartment units, the Lovely Taiwan Shop, the SPOT-Taipei Film House, out-of-the-ordinary footwear, and much more—strikes the eye like a brilliant explosion of inventive sparks.

In the area that begins around Fujin Street and Minsheng East Road Section 5 and extends to Yanshou Street and Xingzhong Street, most of the residences are old apartment buildings, five stories high at most and more than 30 years old. The majority of the buildings have a small garden out front, and are popular rental property among firms engaged in architectural design, advertising design, and movies and television. The deeply shaded Fujin Street, in particular, feels far removed from the noisy hubbub along the main streets.

Minsheng Community covers an area of about three square kilometers, so it’s not big, but it is Taiwan’s first American-style pilot community. The design was hatched in 1967 using a US$5-million loan provided under a US foreign aid program. Oozing a relaxed, American way of using space, after a half-century of evolution the project has emerged as the single community in all of Taiwan with the highest concentration of activity in the cultural and creative industries.

The community is home to over 200 companies or freelance individuals engaged in design, movies, and television, and the area is often chosen as a filming location for movies, TV shows, and music videos. Scenes for the movie Au Revoir Taipei were filmed on Xindong Street, while the makers of both Taipei Exchanges and Turn Left Turn Right did filming in Minsheng Community and the Fujin Street area.

Interior décor at Budda Tea House, which has been open for business for more than 20 years on Fujin Street, features tatami mats, sliding doors, and hanging curtains. Outside there are red doors and posts, plus flowers and old trees in the courtyard. These features lend a distinctly Oriental feel to the place. The shop offers a wide selection of teas, and year after year their fragrance and flavor never change. The proprietor sources his tea from a plantation in his hometown in Nantou County’s Lugu Township, and he roasts the tealeaves himself to maintain consistent quality.

Across the street from the quiet, shady Xinzhong Park is an understated and elegant shop called Lane & Trip, which specializes in city bicycles from Europe. Unlike ordinary bicycle shops, which bristle with cycles suspended from the ceiling, Lane & Trip only has about a dozen or so bikes on display, each with a style all its own. Also on display are bicycle seats, riding clothes, bandanas, and other accessories. The overall effect is one of relaxed refinement. Most of the shop’s city bikes come already assembled from factories in the UK and Denmark, where the emphasis is on foldable convenience. Created by famous designers and made by hand, these bicycles afford style-conscious urbanites a mode of transportation quite unlike anything one usually runs across.

Little Fujin Street, with its increasing numbers of distinctive knick-knack shops, floral design shops, and smartly appointed coffee shops, has now begun to have an impact on nearby streets. The result is a growing atmosphere of style-conscious living.

Among the 11 creative clusters planned out by the city government, relatively well-known ones in the center of town include the Kang-Qing-Long district (Yongkang, Qingtian, and Longquan streets) and the Wen-Luo-Ding area (Wenzhou, Roosevelt, and Dingzhou roads), while Taipei’s eastern quarter has its Very Fun Park.

The American-style Fujin Street area includes a high-end bicycle shop, a vinyl record store, and teahouses that beckon for passersby to stop in for a sit.

The name “Very Fun Park” derives from the big Very Fun Park art festival organized each year by the Fubon Art Foundation in Taipei’s eastern quarter. Because of the extremely high land prices and fierce competition there, merchants rack their brains to find ways to stand out from the crowd, and the result is a patchwork quilt of tremendous variety.

In the older neighborhoods in more centrally located parts of Taipei, cultural creativity hasn’t quite reached the same level of maturity, but some special things are nevertheless happening there, too.

The traditional shopping district of Bangka is centered around the Longshan Temple, and features lots of old shops selling Buddhist worship items, herbal teas, and the like. Bangka combines with the nearby Dali Street clothing and accessories district, the Huaxi Street Night Market, and the refurbished Bopiliao area to form a tourism destination with a strong flavor of traditional culture. Local merchants there have jointly established an antiquarian society that organizes guided tours and runs creative marketplaces in an effort to breathe life back into the old neighborhoods and familiarize more people with the place where Taipei was born.

There are a lot of distinctive little shops in the back streets of the creative cluster that is centered around the National Palace Museum and extends to include the areas around Soochow University and Shih Chien University. In particular, something akin to a small town with its own separate personality and complete array of urban amenities has grown up around Shih Chien University, driven by the design-related departments at the school, by the sparks thrown off in the meeting of shops and students, and by the arrival of more and more shops selling a wide array of household goods.

The creative cluster centered around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station—with accessories shops housed in remodeled old apartment units, the Lovely Taiwan Shop, the SPOT-Taipei Film House, out-of-the-ordinary footwear, and much more—strikes the eye like a brilliant explosion of inventive sparks.

Travel buff and author Han Liang-lu once said: “Only a city with a certain level of maturity and civilization can give birth to a backstreet aesthetic.” In her view, the maturity of a city’s culture is measured by more than just its shopping malls and department stores, because the most beautiful things are generally to be found in a city’s labyrinths of winding lanes, where here one shop sells handmade oils, there another offers old postcards, and still somewhere else a third sells old silverware. Places like Soho in New York, Santa Ana in Madrid, Kami-Kitazawa in Tokyo, and Notting Hill in London are where the rich grain of these cities’ humanity is to be found on its finest display.

Taipei’s creative clusters show the depth of Taipei’s urban culture, but they all face the same set of challenges, such as regeneration and maintenance of the overall environment within the cluster, the impact of continually climbing rents on small creative shops, the lack of a platform where nearby residents and shop owners can come to a meeting of the minds, and the destruction of communities by large-scale development. Systems are needed to coordinate and manage such issues, and to facilitate the healthy growth of creative clusters. Creativity must be embedded into urban spaces and urban lives if a big, robust creative economy is going to be built.

The American-style Fujin Street area includes a high-end bicycle shop, a vinyl record store, and teahouses that beckon for passersby to stop in for a sit.

Shady, winding back streets are the best places for Taipei’s creative clusters to form.

The creative cluster centered around Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT station—with accessories shops housed in remodeled old apartment units, the Lovely Taiwan Shop, the SPOT-Taipei Film House, out-of-the-ordinary footwear, and much more—strikes the eye like a brilliant explosion of inventive sparks.

The American-style Fujin Street area includes a high-end bicycle shop, a vinyl record store, and teahouses that beckon for passersby to stop in for a sit.

The American-style Fujin Street area includes a high-end bicycle shop, a vinyl record store, and teahouses that beckon for passersby to stop in for a sit.