At Songshan’s departure gates, aircraft bound for Haneda, Gimpo, and Hongqiao sit among domestic flights, while the city continues around a runway in its middle. The airport occupies a rare piece of central Taipei—and keeps shaping the space above it.
On the approach to Taipei Songshan Airport, apartment rooftops, laundry, and balcony railings appear just beyond the aircraft window as the runway follows the bends of the Keelung River. A few minutes after landing, passengers can be in the city center—beside a runway that also serves a military base.
In 1997, Kaohsiung’s new tower stood alone beside an industrial waterfront, its upper floors rising above a city that still expected to grow richer. It had become Taiwan’s tallest building just as the celebration around it was disappearing.
From a distance, Kaohsiung’s 85 Sky Tower still dominates the harbor skyline. At its base, the observation elevators are stopped, former department-store floors are sealed, and the huge building feels strangely quiet.
From Kaohsiung’s renewed waterfront, the 85 Sky Tower still dominates the skyline, but its lower floors and upper hotel no longer form the busy vertical city they were meant to be. Around it, construction and new attractions have gathered while the tower’s outline has barely changed.
Kaohsiung’s northern districts run outward in a nearly continuous band of towers, while the south seems to stop short despite its flat ground, port, international airport, and MRT line. From the map, the missing continuation is hard to mistake.
On weekends, Hanshin Arena’s food court stays crowded, with diners waiting up to two hours for Din Tai Fung. Just behind the polished shopping complex, Ruifeng Night Market is serving a very different kind of crowd.
In Kaohsiung, a fifteen-minute walk can feel too long for the heat, while a scooter-filled road can make a YouBike seem like the harder choice. Then the short horns begin—close, frequent, and carrying information that is easy to misread.
On a walk through Taipei, orange YouBikes still appear in substantial fixed stations while newer white-and-yellow bikes stand in much smaller rows nearby. They look like successive versions of the same rental system, but they occupy the city differently.
Near a station in the morning, YouBikes pass in such a steady stream that the bicycles seem almost to outnumber the commuters. By the time the soy milk cools, that small rush raises a much larger question about the scale of the system.