For decades this status quo held, even as friction grew between the city government and the residents of Treasure Hill. Officials saw it as a slum — its improvised buildings, built up over the years amid piles of trash, were not only unsightly, but also in flagrant violation of the city’s safety codes. In 2002, the whole settlement was declared illegal and the authorities began the process of clearing the area and turning it into a park.

First the city tried to bulldoze the homes around the edges, but the residents just retreated to the buildings on top of the hill and the decaying bunkers within, refusing to leave. The authorities then attempted to disrupt the community by destroying the bridges and staircases that connected the different parts of the settlement.

That’s when Marco Casagrande, a Finnish architect, stepped in. The Taipei City Government had asked him to study the “organic layer” of the city and how they could react to it by means of urban planning. “I found out that Treasure Hill was actually much more ecological than the modern city,” he said. “They were recycling all their organic waste. They were even filtering water to be reused.”

He persuaded the city to halt the bulldozers and recruited 200 volunteers from the local community to help him rebuild. “We worked together and we remade the farms, rebuilt the connections between houses, and so on,” he said. “Then rumors started to spread across the city. The media started to follow us, and when the media came, the politicians were next in the ecosystem — the same people who were destroying it three weeks earlier.”

Unfortunately, there was still a problem — the city couldn’t overlook the building codes. But Casagrande found a loophole: He declared that since the houses had been handmade, they were a form of art. “The city commissioned me to make a public artwork, and Treasure Hill is the artwork. That’s where [people] live now,” he said. “That’s how they rationalized it.”

In 2010, the city took the project a step further — rebranding Treasure Hill as Taipei Artist Village, alongside several other sites around the city. Today, artists from around the world can apply for the Treasure Hill Artist-in-Residence program, while walking tours are available to guide visitors around its twisting streets and alleyways.

“The politicians were next — the same people who were destroying it three weeks earlier.”

But Casagrande believes it can still be much more. “Treasure Hill surfaces many of the future possibilities of environmentally sustainable urban living,” he wrote in 2006 in Taiwan Architect magazine. “When the old farming-based values of Treasure Hill and those of the surrounding modern city meet, a new kind of ecological urbanism might be born.”