Qi Li

Qi Li is a doctoral student at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. She studies urban informalities, zoning technologies, and land institutional shifts in Asian cities.

Research Project

Land-taking for technology parks: informality as a question and solution

My dissertation studies the tangled process of land expropriation in the remaining villages of Taipei and Shanghai in government-led technology park projects. The current land enclosure by the two metropolitan governments has faced great challenges in acquiring land that is attached to informal housing and fractional subdivisions. The phenomena of informal settlements and inadequate property rights are prevailing in the studied areas due to several reasons: (1) the highly complicated property transactions on the metropolitan fringes over the long urbanization history, (2) the increasing demand for accommodations of population inflows, (3) the problematic regulation on the land use, and (4) the land speculation in urban development projects. To work through the difficulty in acquiring the land, both metropolitan governments have taken multiple development techniques, such as forced eviction, zone expropriation, and selective formalization. Correspondingly, villagers and residents who owned or lived in such informal settlements also proposed alternative solutions for maintenance and relocation.

By conducting in-depth fieldwork on the local communities, this dissertation aims to investigate multiple development paths of informal settlements and related social impacts in the ongoing technology park projects in Taipei and Shanghai. It is structured by six core research questions: (1) What are the challenges to expropriating informal settlements in specific urban expansion contexts of Taiwan and China? (2) How do the two governments deal with informal settlements through zoning techniques? (3) Regarding informal property rights, how do the local communities mobilize, debate, and react, and what are their major concerns? (4) What are the socio-economic effects of distinct exploitation patterns of informal settlements? (5) How to identify the substantive public interest in such land takings? (6) How is it possible to come up with a negotiable and inclusive development pattern for informal settlements? 

Publication

Edited Book

Qi Li, Zikri Rahman, and Joyce C.H.Liu, Eds. (2022). Where are the people? People’s Theater in Inter-Asian Societies [民眾在何處？亞際社會的民眾劇場]. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Press. ISBN: 9789865470500 (English version) / 9789865470517 (中文版).

Article

李齊. (2023). 桃園航空城區段徵收的分析與啟示. 實驗主義治理. Available at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dyXBvt_zHlTSVr36HrsU3w
Qi Li. (2021). “Science Park Must Be Defended: Taiwan’s Solution in the State of Emergency”. Conflict, Justice, Decolonization: Critical Studies of Inter-Asian Society. Available at: https://cjdproject.web.nycu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/sites/167/2021/11/Li_2021_Science-Park-Must-Be-Defended_-Taiwans-Solution-in-the-State-of-Emergency-1-1.pdf
Qi Li. (2020). “Freedom to Move, No Freedom to Settle: The Labor Migrancy Dilemma in Contemporary China’s Urbanization”. In Rethinking the Failed Project of Equality. International Center for Cultural Studies.
 Qi Li. (2020). “The Non-Fictitious Destiny of Youth in Hong Kong”. In Social Movements in a World of Backsliding Democracy. International Center for Cultural Studies.
 Qi Li. (2020). “State Regulation, Pandemic, and Africans in South China”. In Pandemic Politics: Disruption and (Re)action. International Center for Cultural Studies.