Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the politics and the temporal contradictions emerging from the large-scale reconstruction project of military villages in urban Taiwan. It looks at the rationale of the project as well as the effects of different temporal horizons of planning on the life of the residents.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the politics and the temporal contradictions emerging from the large-scale relocation project of military villages in urban Taiwan. Recent literature on modern capitalist time, futurity and planning has called for ethnographic research exploring the heterogeneity and the conflictual social experience of time in modern capitalism (Bear 2016; Guyer 2007; Abram 2014). The paper aims at ethnographically documenting the conflictual interests and the temporal gaps that this reconstruction project entails.

Created after the retreat of the Nationalist government (KMT), military villages were temporary makeshift settlements housing military personnel and their families until the return to mainland China, which never materialised. Only in 1990s the Ministry of Defence initiated a policy of large-scale village reconstruction, relocating residents to modern high-rise blocks. Yet, despite being promised a house for decades, the residents of Zhongxin village in Taipei were among the last to be relocated. The promise of a new house was reiterated at the vigil of each political election, but never concretised until October 2016, resulting in deep political mistrust.

As a consequence, the residents lived in a permanent state of impermanence until 2016, when now elderly, they were asked to relocate. How did residents fill the gap between the temporal horizons of an elusive promise and their own life aspirations? By conceptualising this relocation plan as an "elusive promise" (Abram and Weszkalnys 2011; 2013), I investigate these suspended expectations of modernity, as well as the ways aspirations are reactivated and anticipated at the vigil of the move.