Urban Farming in Taiwan: How Institutions Cultivate the Margins of a Dense City

When speaking of urban agriculture in Taiwan, the first question to pose is not "who tills the soil" but "who built the framework." In many countries urban farming starts from citizens' initiative, with government endorsing it afterward. Taiwan's beginnings, too, lay with citizens, yet what is distinctive is the speed and thoroughness of what followed: the institutionalization. Community gardens were upgraded into formal municipal programs, given subsidies and dedicated departments, and then connected upward to national law. This chain of "systematization" is what sets Taiwanese urban farming apart from its Asian neighbors.

The vantage point of this piece is institutions and policy. Why was Taipei able to raise up the urban image of a "Garden City" (Tianyuan Chengshi) and lay out more than seven hundred gardens in five years? Why was the rooftop placed at the center of policy? Why, in 2022, was a law called the "Food and Agricultural Education Act" deemed necessary at all? These questions cannot be answered by a story of enthusiasm, only by reading the administrative blueprint. By tracing in order the hard-to-see skeleton of ordinances, subsidy schemes, and reorganized ministries, the landscape of green rooftops and community plots comes into focus as something that was, deliberately, made to happen.

To anticipate the conclusion: Taiwanese urban farming has been honed less as a means of food self-sufficiency and more as a tool of urban governance. Climate adaptation, disaster resilience, citizen participation, health and welfare, food education — the aims lined up in policy documents position the garden not as a single vegetable plot but as a node binding together several administrative agendas. Even where yields are modest, institutions load it with meaning. What follows unravels that skeleton in order: history, forms, policy, regions, and cases.

This database currently holds about eight cases from Taiwan. The breakdown is weighted toward the twin metropolitan cities of the capital region, Taipei and New Taipei, then spreads south to Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Tainan. From rooftop gardens and a rainwater park, to a senior-citizen farm, community gardens, a participatory rooftop farm, and a school food-and-farming education program — the sheer variety of spaces and actors is the first thing that tells you about this island. That it resists a single template is itself a reflection of policy pursuing several aims at once.

From an institutional standpoint, the most eloquent figures are in Taipei's Garden City Initiative. From roughly 292 gardens at its 2015 launch, the count swelled to 733 by February 2020 — about 19.75 hectares, with reportedly more than 54,000 participating citizens. Organized into four types — community gardens, rooftop gardens, school gardens, and allotments — it is the school playground and rooftop gardens that make up the bulk of the sites. That the cases in this database cluster around 2015 can be read as the imprint that this policy wave left on the ground. The fuller lineage is dug into in the main text's "History" and "Policy" sections.