A Day in Taipei with U.S. Fulbright Scholar Melody Stein
Dadaocheng Pier. Photo by Charlene Wang.
Melody Stein is a landscape architect, writer, and interdisciplinary designer. She is the co-founder of External Affairs, a creative agency for the environmental and life sciences, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute. Previously, she worked at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) on public space projects around the United States. She holds degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University.
Melody is currently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar hosted by National Taipei University’s Graduate Institute of Urban Planning where she is teaching and pursuing a research project focused on landscape approaches to flood resilience in the Keelung River. Her week typically involves multiple trips to 7/11, bicycling around river channels, and making sense of archival maps.
Da’an Park running track in the morning.
7:00am: My apartment here is very compact—the bed is lofted in a raised area over the living space. In the mornings I roll out of bed and make my way down the steps into the apartment. I heat water for coffee and make instant pumpkin porridge for breakfast, which contains bits of seaweed — a snap decision at the grocery store has locked me onto this breakfast path but I have no regrets.
I check my email and messages as I eat—the time difference between New York City where I’m usually based and Taipei is twelve hours, so I wake up to a barrage of communication. My partner Justin Morris-Marano has been steering the ship of our agency since I’ve been away on Fulbright but I still keep abreast of pending client proposals and try to attend meetings when possible.
8:00am: I’ve had trouble sleeping recently—late night, timezone straddling meetings can’t help—but I read somewhere that it’s very important to get some exercise and see sunlight within an hour of waking up. When I can, I head out for a run around Da’an Park. In the mornings, people of all ages are out running around the perimeter track or participating in group exercises in the lawn spaces — the park is a fantastic public space.
10:00am: I meet regularly with my faculty host, Dr. Kuei-Hsien Liao. Dr. Liao is a leading expert on flood resilience in Taiwan and the Executive Director of the Taiwan Rivers Network, a non-profit that advocates for river restoration and protection. We often meet on campus at NTPU or, like today, find a cafe somewhere in Taipei. Her deep understanding of the current discourse around flood risk management in Taiwan has been invaluable.
The Courtyard at Not Just Library in Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.
My research investigates how nature-based solutions to flood resilience can be implemented within highly urbanized contexts, using the Keelung River as a case study. River restoration approaches that involve the large-scale dismantling of existing flood control infrastructure and re-meandering are often not feasible in the kind of dense urban conditions that have been enabled by extensive flood control infrastructure. In this, and many other cases, the river has allowed the city to form through facilitating trade and irrigating agriculture, but the city has also irrevocably formed the extents and conditions of the river—excavating it from meandering mud and setting it straight within concretized channels and calibrated diversion structures.
11:30am: After our meeting, I find a space to catch up on some work and prepare for an upcoming guest lecture. Lately I’ve been working from a private library space called Not Just Library in Songshan Cultural and Creative Park. Not Just Library is operated by the Taiwan Design Research Institute and has an impressive collection of art and design-related books and magazines as well as space to work and a beautiful courtyard for catching some sun.
Midstream on the Keelung River.
The water’s edge at Nanhu Bridge; an area along the Keelung River as it flows into Taipei.
Currently, I’m deep in a literature review of interdisciplinary land-based discourses including re-wilding, ecosystem-scale biomimicry, and blue-green infrastructure. Collating the methods and objectives of overlapping areas of study feels like the only way to cut through some of the jargon and discipline-specific terminology and start to parse out useful approaches to integrate into my own landscape architectural background.
Flood wall with the city rising just beyond.
2:00pm: I pick up my favorite snack: a lemon sparkling water and plant-based meat floss rice ball from Family Mart. My most frequent purchases are from either 7/11 — known more commonly here just as 7 — and Family Mart. These are convenience stores but also so much more. They contain seating areas, ATMs, mailing services, and a vast range of packaged food and alcohol. They also offer some classic fresh snacks: roasted sweet potatoes and baozi in hot cases and a bubbling crock of tea eggs on the counter. I’ve bought meals, home supplies, and even clothing essentials here–when caught in a rainstorm, some fresh socks make a big difference! The convenience stores are also almost always open—including during the typhoon warnings that crisscrossed Taiwan this fall.
2:30pm: A critical part of my research involves fieldwork in order to document and understand the current conditions of the river. Today, the plan is to investigate the midstream area. I take the train to Nangang Exhibition Center and head upstream by bike. My reconnaissance starts at Nanhu Bridge—the division between downstream and midstream I’ve identified based on the hydromorphological conditions cited in some of my background research. I’ve spent the past several weeks pouring over maps and studying this segment of the river from within my computer screen, but riding along, feeling the grade change in my legs, stopping to investigate the minor shifts in river channel width or embankment construction reminds me of the criticality of being on site.
7:00pm: After dark, I head back into the city center to meet up with friends for dinner at a rechao spot near Da’an park. Rechao 熱炒 is basically ‘hot stir-fry.’ It’s a style of eating as much as a style of food. A bunch of different kinds of foods are all fried up in a wok over a hot flame. It’s the kind of meal you have to have with a group because you’ll want to try a bunch of different things. Rechao is best consumed with ice cold 18 Days Taiwan Beer. 18 Days gets its name from the fact that the beer has a very limited shelf life of literally eighteen days, meaning it’s very fresh, a quality I never thought to look for in beer but that I’ve found does make a difference.
10:00pm: I walk back to my apartment through the darkened streets. There’s a chill in the air in the evenings these days. It’s not a New York winter, but it’s cold enough to know the seasons have changed. I’ll head back to my life and work in New York City in February, but I have a feeling that I’ll always find reasons to return to Taipei.