Extending aspirations: Taipei street performers and collaborative possibility

This paper seeks to extend geographical research on aspiration beyond existing scholarship in Britain that focuses on the political discourses of aspiration and individual emotional responses to uncertain neoliberal futures. Drawing on anthropological work on social navigation and aspirational future‐making in cities elsewhere, we examine how aspiring Taipei street performers navigate the streets and wider environments of opportunity and constraint. Our ethnographic work shows that while Taipei street performers navigate individually, they also collaborate in two broad ways. First, in situ via temporary groupings, sustained partnerships and fan communities. Second, relationally by forming a learning/support community and a street art association to increase their terms of recognition with the public and the state. These collaborations challenge the stereotypical individualistic profile of cultural workers in a post‐industrial cultural economy. The collaborative actions of Taipei street performers exceed conventional neoliberal logics of inter‐city competitiveness to include progressive notions of mutual care, volunteerism, and the formation of a collective identity to engage the state. Although Taipei street performers’ socio‐spatial forms of navigation are not cast in overtly political terms, either in drawing from historical antecedents or in contesting neoliberalisation, they are nevertheless significant in wider geographies of the political. We contribute to a growing body of work that looks beyond the inheritance of collective politics in the Keynesian West as the sole form of push back against the ills of neoliberal urbanism, and that is open to the possibility of a variety of other collective formations in other parts of the urban world informing progressive future‐making.