Civic infrastructure in the making: A secondary city’s shopkeeper alliances and art festivals

Source abstract

This article examines the shopkeeper networks in Changhua City, a secondary city in Taiwan, and the festive events they have organized over the past decade. It aims to reflect critically on the state- and capital-led regional and place revitalization. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2024, the author argues that at the core of efforts to challenge the city’s conservative political, economic, and cultural atmosphere lies the loose alliances of shopkeepers. They cultivate subsistence-based solidarity that underpins experimental festive practices. These exceptional festivities, in turn, reinvent everyday spaces, leading to the emergence of a grassroots civic infrastructure. The case of Changhua demonstrates how the dialectics between the everyday and the exceptional is vital to reviving creative yet place-based civic life, and suggests that relatively limited state and capital intervention in smaller cities may provide conditions for such processes.