Community Empowerment and Heritage Conservation: The Experience of Beitou District in Taipei City, Taiwan

Based on the inspiring experience of the heritage conservation and revitalisation in Beitou, a district of Taipei City in Taiwan, this paper explores the role of community in heritage conservation, the interactive process of heritage formation by community engagement and empowerment, the different approaches of heritage conservation between experts and local people, and the corresponding theoretical implications of heritage definitions. This paper argues that heritage, as the inseparable right of people from the point of view of cultural citizenship, is more helpfully seen not as an absolute idea like an artefact, but rather a relative concept which depends on the cultural consensus of the particular group of people who cherish it. Beyond the top-down and linear model of traditional heritage, the community-based heritage model adopts bottom-up and cyclic approaches in the process of heritage formation. Various stakeholders, social actors, and local authorities need to participate, communicate, and reach a compromise to decide what could be their heritage. Only then does heritage become the heritage of the people and an inalienable means of knowing ourselves.