Session proposal: Interrogating Taoyuan Aerotropolis in Taiwan: Litigation, Documentation, Artivism

Organised by Qi Li, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Located in northern Taiwan, the Taoyuan Aerotropolis Project plans to construct the third runway of the Taoyuan International Airport and several zones for industrial, logistic, commercial, and residential purposes. With a planning scale of 4,564 hectares, it is currently the largest zone expropriation project in Taiwan, affecting over twenty thousand property owners and residents in the area. The controversial land-taking program of the Aerotropolis, namely, the zone expropriation mechanism that allows the authority to conduct forced eviction of private property and extract significant revenues through land sales, has raised great social concerns.

This session presents the countermovement towards the zone expropriation administration from three aspects: juridical, journalism, and artivism. Qi Li’s paper focuses on the judicial remedies for the Aerotropolis zone expropriation disputes and the legal-political debates on defining the public interest in such cases in Taiwan. Liang-Ju Chiang’s article, from a micro perspective, shows the life changes, living difficulties, and emotional risks among expropriated individuals. Her writing also unfolds the struggle against forced eviction by civil organizations and grassroots activists. Cheng Hsiang Wang’s paper demonstrates the artivist team “Delayed Takeoff from Taoyuan”’s interaction with traditional beliefs, folk histories, and remaining dwellers in Haikou village, one of the Aerotropolis development sites. This paper interprets artistic actions as a methodology to engage with the vanishing rural scenes and memories. A detailed discussion on the potential of artivist action will be presented by Yen-Xiang Lin on his latest art installation, Forced Landing, which won the Taipei Art Awards 2024. Opening the interdisciplinary dialogues, this session aims to interrogate the developmentalist discourse of the Taoyuan Aerotropolis and explore the possibility of shifting the discourse through multi-layer social efforts.