TEO YEE CHIN

Ph.D. Student

Research Title: Spatial Practices and the Making of Alternative Food Networks in Taiwan
Research Group: Politics, Economies And Space (PEAS)
Thesis Advisor: Dr Miles Kenney-Lazar

I am a registered architect with two decades of practising experience in urban environments. Beyond the narrative of green urbanism, I seek a broader understanding of sustainability involving where and how our resources originate. My broader interest lies in understanding how rural places may be able to reproduce themselves in spite of a rapidly urbanising world.

My PhD research investigates alternative agro-food networks in Taiwan and how they are produced through spatial practices and contestations. Agriculture in Taiwan has a long history and is technically advanced with a high level of knowledge and experience in its state institutions as well as the farming population. However, the production value of agriculture lags far behind the manufacturing, electronic and high-tech industries, leading to a depopulation of farming villages and a crisis in rural renewal.

An oft-taken pathway to overcome this is through the mobilisation of food narratives that are linked to the protection of the local environment, ecology and heritage, thus seeking new networks of exchange that can sustain higher value for the farmers and their produce. I study the process of how these alternative agro-food networks are constructed. Particularly, I explore how they are subject to the contestation between local political forces on the one hand, and how they negotiate new relationships of socially-responsible patronage by corporate-industrial forces on the other. I argue that these networks become spatialised across the island through a process of mutual territorialisation between the city and the countryside while harnessing imaginations of landscape.