Abstract
Reservoirs are large-scale water facilities with multiple functions, such as water supply, power generation, and tourism. This paper introduces the new community and cultural landscape formed by the indigenous people, engineers, workers who left their homes, and many migrating families at the Shimen Reservoir in Taoyuan, Taiwan, as an example. We analyzed how the community value of reservoir construction contributed to the development of the landscape through fieldwork, document review, and in-depth interviews. First, the new communities created to meet the needs of the immigrants influenced the surrounding environment and shaped a particular lifestyle. Secondly, new immigrants have formed a community consensus, and changes in the diet and natural landscape have promoted local tourism and affected the function of the reservoir. This study concludes that promoting local values through autonomous community action is a sustainable approach to community development. Tourism development with its symbiotic relationship with the reservoir can meet the needs of local socio-economic and cultural development. For sustainable development, a vulnerability study based on the Shimen Reservoir tourism is necessary.
Highlights
The ‘landscape’ usually describes all natural objects in the environment, including the relationship between various features in space, such as land, water, air, plants, and animals, including human beings [1]
Cultural landscapes are summarized in the Guidelines for the Implementation of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention for the Protection of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage under three categories: ‘landscapes designed and created intentionally by man’, ‘organically evolved landscapes’, and ‘associative cultural landscapes’ [4]
The sources of the data collected for this study included (1) fieldwork to understand the current situation and the development direction of the Shimen Urban Planning Zone, (2) a review of documents from before and after the construction of Shimen Reservoir, and (3) in-depth interviews in which people live within the reservoir community could share stories and details about the reservoir before and after development, as described
Summary
The ‘landscape’ usually describes all natural objects in the environment, including the relationship between various features in space, such as land, water, air, plants, and animals, including human beings [1]. Spatial practices are shaped by people’s actions in space, which in turn shape space, which is extended by people’s actions and constructs their cities according to their life needs [6]. This accords with the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre who, in his 1975 book La production de l’espace, referred to a triadic dialectic of spatial production, which included “spatial practices”, “spatial reproduction”, and “representational space” [7,8,9]
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