Introduction: About the Book
 
This book is the fruit of a Franco-Taiwanese collaboration funded by Academia Sinica, le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the National Science Council (NSC, or Ministry of Science and Technology), and National Taiwan University (NTU). It came about on the initiative of a team of geographers, sociologists, urban planners, anthropologists, and economists from Academia Sinica, National Chengchi University, National Taiwan University, together with members of laboratories jointly run by universities and two big French research centers, CNRS and l'Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD).
 
The aim of the collaboration was to cross-reference Taiwanese and French ideas on the intra-urban dynamics that have been set in motion by globalization in Asian cities. It involved comparing research subject priorities in this field as well as the approaches chosen to deal with them within a geographical zone expanding from Northeast to Southern Asia. Rather than a comparison between Western and Asian visions of the same urban objects, the project aimed to highlight differences and/or similarities in the approaches of scientific communities that are inevitably influenced by national issues.
 
It emerged that the differences between researches in the two countries largely determined the conditions of the survey, with Taiwanese researchers focusing on their own country and conversely, with fairly wide-ranging research in Asia on the part of the French.