The Birth Of A New Taipei : Citizen pressure has created a clean, green city.

There's more than one way to appreciate a tree. On a recent Saturday morning, as he leads 25 parents and schoolchildren along a street next to Taipei's Ta-An Forest Park, Jerome Su stops before a flowering sweet-gum tree. He crushes an aromatic leaf between his fingers, then holds it to the nose of a young boy so he can smell the musky scent. "People used to feel that trees should be cut down for economic development," says the 50- year-old publisher, pointing to the base of the tree. Cracked and gnarled, the trunk struggles through the layers of concrete wrapped around its base. "Now we've got to learn how to preserve them. We'll have to get up a petition."

The fact that his class even has a tree to examine has much to do with people like Su, whose activism has helped remake the Taiwanese capital in the last decade. Once one of the most chaotic cities in Asia, Taipei is now ranked at the top of regional livability surveys. Less than 10 years ago, the whole eastern section of town was little more than a fetid garbage dump. Now luxury shopping malls, cinemas and high-rise apartment buildings fill the area. City lanes once choked with traffic flow smoothly at all but peak hours. Forbidding government buildings have been transformed into museums, literary salons and galleries. The changes are remarkable--all the more so because they have been driven primarily by Taipei's residents. Says Diane Ying, publisher of Commonwealth, Taiwan's leading business magazine, "The city now belongs to the citizens and not the bureaucrats."

To the casual visitor, places like Singapore and Hong Kong remain more striking in their sleek modernity. But no other city in Asia has changed as radically as Taipei in the last decade. Ten years ago it often took more than an hour to cross the city by car. Streets were clogged by tens of thousands of motorcycles and scooters, their riders wearing surgical masks to block out the smog. Those living on the outskirts of the city often left home at 6 a.m. in order to reach work before 9. Now 40 percent of Taipei's citizens use the subway, which opened last year, and the average person spends 24 minutes commuting each day. That has drastically reduced the number of vehicles on the roads--although motorcycles are still inescapable--and made the air breathable. In the past seven years, the level of suspended particles in the air has dropped almost 50 percent.

Rising incomes have contributed to the improvement in living conditions. (Per capita income has doubled over the past decade to more than $13,000.) But the city's transformation has also been fueled by the same forces that have driven Taiwan's democratic reforms. As native-born Taiwanese took control of the government, they began to treat the capital as home, rather than simply a pit stop on the way to retaking China. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, a whole generation of Taiwanese, educated abroad, began to return and try to raise Taipei to international standards. A burgeoning middle class had more time for leisure, which created pressure for more parks, modern cinemas and cleaner streets. Students who had spent their energy clashing with police over politics gradually turned to environmental issues. "During the 1980s the voice of an emerging civil society started to be heard," says Hsia Chu-joe, an urban-planning professor.

More recently Taipei's citizens have begun to push the government to upgrade the city's infrastructure. In the 1990s a coalition of NGOs pressured authorities into creating Ta-An Forest Park, instead of a sports stadium, on the 26,000-hectare site of a slum where Army veterans once lived among rats and stray dogs. The sprawling, $9 billion ...