Community Ingenuity within Institutional Disaster Housing in Taiwan

Status: Ongoing research (Master’s thesis)
Location: Pingtung County, Taiwan
Support: Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies Research Grant
Role: Researcher (fieldwork, analysis, synthesis)

This ongoing research examines how indigenous communities adapt when state-led post-disaster housing systems prioritize speed and standardization over cultural, social, and economic continuity. Through ethnographic fieldwork in southern Taiwan, I study how everyday adaptations reveal gaps between policy intent and lived experience—and how resilience is often produced by communities themselves rather than by the systems designed to support them.

The project is grounded in fieldwork conducted in Rinari, an indigenous relocation village established after Typhoon Morakot (2009), and will form the basis of my master’s thesis.

Context & Research Challenge

Post-disaster relocation programs are typically evaluated through metrics such as speed, safety, and delivery efficiency. In Taiwan, Typhoon Morakot triggered one of the country’s largest relocation efforts, moving indigenous communities into newly built, standardized housing settlements.
While these policies succeeded in providing immediate shelter, they raised deeper questions:

How do standardized housing systems interact with distinct cultural identities and governance structures?
What happens to livelihoods, social life, and long-term adaptability after relocation?
Where does “resilience” actually come from—policy design, or community ingenuity
Rather than treating relocation as a solved technical problem, this research reframes it as a systems question about how institutional decisions shape everyday life over time.

children's sketch of the flood and resettlement project outside the indigenous kindergarten, Rinari

Research Approach

I used ethnographic fieldwork to understand how policy decisions materialize in daily practices.

Methods included:

Long-term, in-situ observation within the village
Informal and semi-structured interviews with residents across households and age groups
Spatial documentation of housing adaptations, informal economies, and shared spaces
Conversations with scholars and local experts working on indigenous architecture and preservation

i stayed with the widow of the former chief villager, who runs a home-stay in her house with the extra rooms

at an indigenous scholar's event, i get to meet scholars, and figures from tribal and local government leadership

I lived near the settlement and conducted interviews in front yards, shops, churches, and shared spaces. This allowed me to observe not only what residents said, but how policies surfaced materially—through extensions, modifications, informal businesses, and social routines.

Being physically present was critical. These dynamics cannot be captured through documents, surveys, or aerial plans alone.

the view of the church next to my stay.

Site & System

Rinari is composed of relocation sites for three indigenous tribes—Paiwan (Majia and Dashe) and Rukai (Haocha)—housed in adjacent but socially distinct neighborhoods. Although the housing stock is uniform, the communities differ in language, governance, history, and access to ancestral land.

This structure allowed me to study how the same institutional system produces different outcomes depending on social and territorial context.

Key Findings

1. Adaptation Happens at the Household Level

The settlement consists of nearly 500 standardized steel-frame houses designed for rapid construction. Over time, residents transformed these units through extensions, murals, cafés, workshops, and gathering spaces.

What appears as architectural uniformity on paper has become a highly differentiated environment in practice—driven almost entirely by resident initiative rather than formal planning.

the house of Rukai's chief added iconography and symbols to the standardized wall, emphasizing their status

2. Livelihoods Are Structurally Constrained,
Not Culturally Determined

Before relocation, both Paiwan and Rukai communities relied on cultivation, livestock, and foraging. After relocation, their strategies diverged.

Many Paiwan households retained access to ancestral land, allowing them to hybridize rural production with small businesses in the settlement.
The Rukai community, having lost their original settlement entirely, turned more heavily to tourism, cultural programming, and hospitality.

This contrast suggests that “resilience” is not simply cultural—it is enabled or constrained by structural access to land and resources.

this Paiwan family turned their first floor into a cafe, in which the grandmother sell fresh coffee, from beans the grandfather and father grow at their old settlement.

3. Cultural Identity Is Actively Reconstructed

Relocation brought communities closer to urban centers, increasing exposure to dominant Han culture and Mandarin as a daily language. At the same time, churches and community spaces emerged as anchors for cultural continuity.

Several residents described a “skipped generation” now relearning traditions disrupted by earlier colonial and state interventions. Identity here is not preserved passively—it is actively rebuilt under constraint.

a elderly lady taking classes on how to make their traditional costume

the city's trash truck will come in at 7am every morning, playing radios to encourage villagers to "build a clean taiwan together"

4. Policy Relies on Invisible Labor

The vibrancy of Rinari today is often cited as evidence of successful relocation. Yet this vitality is largely the result of unrecognized community labor—creative adaptations, social coordination, and informal problem-solving.

Residents repeatedly noted limitations in the housing system, including material choices, lack of space for growing families, and inflexible layouts. Resilience, in this case, is not a policy outcome but a community response to policy limits.

the house i stayed in had expanded their living space, adding additional shelter and kitchen

Synthesis

Across observations, interviews, and spatial analysis, a consistent pattern emerged:

Institutional systems designed for efficiency often externalize adaptability to the communities they serve.

Standardization creates safety and speed, but long-term livability depends on whether people are able to reinterpret, modify, and reclaim space. When systems do not account for this, resilience becomes uneven, informal, and fragile.

Although grounded in Taiwan, this research surfaces broader insights relevant to:

Climate relocation and resilience planning
Housing policy and public infrastructure
Indigenous and marginalized community engagement
Institutional design under uncertainty

As climate-driven displacement increases globally, relocation systems will continue to rely—often implicitly—on community ingenuity to succeed. Understanding where and how this happens is essential for designing policies and processes that support, rather than quietly depend on, adaptation.

This research is ongoing and will be developed into my master’s thesis. The next phase will deepen comparative analysis across relocation sites and explore implications for participatory housing design, governance models, and long-term policy evaluation.