Grip it and Ship it: the Taiwanese Tale of Urbanism

Taiwan's cities will frustrate you at the ticket machine and impress you everywhere else. It's a design philosophy the western urbanism realm could do with paying attention to.

I’ve just had a couple of weeks in Asia for a bit of a combination of work + fun, so as a little interlude from the podcast programming, I thought it might be a good idea to do a little reflection from a few cities across East Asia with Taipei, Kaohsiung (a city I’ve had my eye on for a little while), Singapore, Xi’an and Chongqing. For there are lessons and inspiration galore to be had for western cities from all of these places, that in some way, shape or form are demonstrating some true Challenger Cities behaviour.

But for today, we’re going to focus on Taiwan as it’s a rather lovely case study in a bit of a mantra we’re preaching here of being “more interestingly less wrong”.

The vibes start at the airport, in my case rolling off back to back redeye flights from Montreal and Munich, into a terminal environment that feels brighter, more spacious and modern than pretty much any North American aviation environment. It’s a good welcome to the weary passenger.

Then you make it to the Metro to get the train into the city and something a bit odd occurs. The shiny futuristic infrastructure is inhabited by a rather outdated ticketing system, for buying a Taipei EasyCard requires cash, whether you’re at the window or the self service machine. In many ways, it sort of sets the tone for Taiwan as credit/debit card payments are far from ubiquitous. Cash, LinePay or using the EasyCard tend to take priority.

(it seems credit/debit card taps are coming to the system sometime in 2026 … bit later than many other places, but quicker than some, like Montreal!)

Taiwan has made a set of choices about what matters and what doesn't, and it hasn't particularly organised those choices around what international visitors expect. It’s kind of refreshing, as it’s really a philosophy that extends far beyond payment mechanisms too.

The metro will get you almost anywhere in Taipei or Kaohsiung, reliably and quickly, for an almost negligible price. High Speed Rail connects the two cities in under two hours, with tickets clearly and affordably priced, without the typical yield based pricing we’ve become so accustomed to for the likes of train tickets in the UK, North America or bits of Europe. YouBike, the city bike share, is woven into the same EasyCard ticketing system as the metro and waiting at station exits to handle the last mile.

It’s not without its edges though. Metro transfers between lines often mean quite cumbersome transfers, walking up one bank of escalators, through various tunnelled corridors, then down another set of escalators, because the budget went into developing more lines rather than perfecting the interchanges where they meet. The Taipei HSR station feel functional to the point of blankness. The system works brilliantly though, it just doesn’t particularly do much flashy.

Speaking of such lack of showing off, the YouBike numbers tell you something shouted about loudly in the traditional urban cycling circles. It is also this that has proven to be the biggest change in Taiwan between my first visit there in 2014.

Taipei's roughly 22,000 bikes generate around 190,000 rides a day … a usage rate about a third higher than Paris's Vélib with a comparable fleet. That’s not because of protected bike lanes (there really aren’t many) or a cycling culture campaign, but because YouBike is actually integrated into the transport network rather than sitting alongside it. It’s the obvious choice for the last mile, from the metro station to home or work or the restaurant.

Taipei and Kaohsiung actually provide a really good counterfactual to how streets are designed in North America too as the road network is not purely dominated by the car. In many cases, the streetscape will see a total absence of sidewalks or cycling lanes, so you walk in the road. Cars might drive quite quick on major arterials, but in many urban streets they will be second class citizens to the people walking or cycling. That etiquette is quite interesting to watch where there are sidewalks too, for people on Youbikes or even scooters will ride on them too. For the most part, perfectly respectfully of the pedestrians.

The scooter is key to Taiwanese mobility too, for there are millions of them, used by almost everyone regardless of income. In many ways, they are the rational urban mobility choice over the car, regardless of your income. Faster than traffic, much cheaper than a car, and parkable pretty much wherever you are. Increasingly, they’re electric too. Gogoro has built a city-wide battery swap network first, then effectively sold scooters to run on it. You don’t charge your battery, but swap it in about six seconds at one of thousands of stations. You can actually cross the entire island this way. It’s an elegant solution to a problem the rest of the world is still trying to solve with expensive cars and insufficient charging points, achieved by doing something structurally different by decoupling the battery from the vehicle and making clean mobility the path of least resistance.

Compare this to the western EV conversation, which remains almost entirely fixated on luxury cars for people with driveways. Taiwan has electrified mass urban mobility because the infrastructure made it obvious, rather that because it made people feel virtuous.

So why the obsession with Kaohsiung?

Kaohsiung was built on the heavy industry of a port, steelworks and shipyards. So when that industrial base started to contract it was left with what every post-industrial city gets in large, empty former-somethings in places that used to matter. The standard move is a masterplan, some glass towers, a name with “quarter” in it and a render that looks nothing like what gets built. Kaohsiung mostly didn’t do that.

Pier 2, a stretch of old port warehouses along the harbour, became a cultural district the organic way as artists used the cheap space, the city backed what was already happening rather than replacing it with something more legible to a planning document, and a real neighbourhood grew from it. The Qiaotou sugar refinery is now home to the likes of cafes and galleries with the original machinery still standing, because nobody felt the need to remove it. The industrial past has in many ways to used to preserve heritage, and add character to what comes next.

And Kaohsiung is really all about character. The detail that brought it together for me was a couple of metro stations. At Formosa Boulevard, the city’s central interchange, Narcissus Quagliata’s Dome of Light fills the ceiling with 4,500 glass panels in something so unexpectedly beautiful that people come specifically to stand under it. Sadly, the installation of projectors for a lightshow didn’t seem to be operating whenever I passed through.

The Ciaotou Sugar Refinery station has elements of old brick work, coupled with the theme of Mikan, the adopted orange cat who has become a symbol of the entire system. The act of a station employee adopting a cat has become a remarkable statement of personality, when you consider how many East Asian metro stations tend to be rather utilitarian spaces. Merch sales featuring Mikan have been enormous.

And despite all of this, Taiwan’s cities are on the whole not exactly pretty. Most buildings are pretty utilitarian, many simply drab from the exterior. From up high, it’s not exactly picture postcard cityscape, but on the ground, at street level it’s exceptionally pleasant and walkable. There is colour to life on the street, especially as the famous night markets come alive.

One could spend a week cataloguing what Taiwan does ‘wrong’ by the standards of what many would consider best practice urbanism.

But such clipboard measures cities against an unrealistic, and perhaps actually undesirable ideal. The actually important consideration is whether people can live well in them, and on that Taiwan’s cities are doing something quietly remarkable that wealthier, perhaps more planned North American cities are visibly failing to do.

Taiwan chose breadth over finish and lives with the trade-offs rather than having deferred delivery indefinitely for every edge to be resolved. It means the transit works because it goes pretty much everywhere. Scooters have become electric because the infrastructure made it easy. The post-industrial areas are alive because space has been provided to play, experiment and be opportunistically creative.

On reflection, so much of Taiwan has especially changed since that first visit in 2014, but it’s standing the test of time. Which contrasts quite a bit with how Singapore continues to evolve and mainland Chinese cities are accelerating like almost nowhere else.

We’ll get to them later in the week … in the meantime …. To Being Challengers.