The blurry picture above is looking at the taipei city hall subway station and a few surrounding buildings. This area is commonly referred to as the Xinyi area. The most notable thing about this area is that it is the location of the world's former tallest building for six years, Taipei 101.
As you can kind of see this is a pretty modern and happening area with a lot of traffic and a lot of tall buildings. The interesting thing is when I first arrived in Taipei about seven and a half years ago, none of these buildings were here. The whole area was just Taipei 101 and a department store, there were no large buildings, no hotels, no office buildings, nothing. just a large flat area with tons of construction. The growth of this area is just staggering. With luxury apartments and hotels, expensive restaurants, and tons of shopping.
While it is very modern area, it is also very soulless. From it's inception it's just been an area where they said "here will be a luxurious and modern area." It was artificially made to be something rather than becoming something. And that has always made it feel quite cold to me. I don't think it helps that many people who live in this area flaunt it and every conversation you have with them seems to eventually become about Xinyi.
But things don't last forever. There is another area of the city to the north that has over time more naturally become the business center of Taipei. Although it is almost strictly commercial, with very few restaurants or homes. Land used to be cheap there so office buildings were built, than more were built, then it just kept expanding further and further east. Now what land is still there is rising in price, and luxury houses are popping up in the mountains to the north of that area.
But what does all this growth mean? well it means the death of other areas of the city. I was told that a little over a decade ago the commercial center of Taipei was the western area. Now you can see that area falling. But that's ok, because with the cheaper prices, more exciting and risky places like foreign restaurants and live performance clubs are sprouting out of the ashes.
