Visit to Kaohsiung and Ping Tung in Taiwan

During the interval between the Chongqing and Sydney SBE16 conferences, Nils Larsson spent 6 days in Kaohsiung, a city of more than one million located in southern Taiwan. One of our colleagues in Kaohsiung, Paul Chou, is Director of the Department of Interior Design at Shu-Te University, and he arranged a week of activity that included jury duty in a design competition, visits to start-up ventures, meetings with senior staff of Kaohsiung City and Ping Tung City; and finally a public lecture to 60 academics, architects, engineers and students.

Joseph Li, who is Executive Director of the Taiwan iiSBE chapter and also Associate Professor at Shu-Te University, is organizing two parallel sessions at WSBE17 Hong Kong that focus on urban resilience in Asian cities and approaches to sustainability followed in Taiwan.

Climate change is now a major public concern in Taiwan, with summer daytime temperatures in Kaohsiung having increased by 2.1ºC over the last 100 years and summer night-time temperatures having increased by 2.3ºC. Other relevant facts are that there were 165 days in 2015 with temperatures over 30ºC, and that PM2.5 concentrations are of increasing concern.