Tuchung Liu

Thesis title: Heritage making between social imagination and governance: towards sustainable culture-led urban regeneration in Taiwan 

Primary supervisor: Dr. Kalliopi Fouseki
Secondary supervisor: Professor May Cassar
Starting date: November 2015
Projected completion date: 2019
Sponsor: Ministry of Education of Taiwan

My research interests are related to the relationship between cultural governance and sustainable development in historical districts, especially in the contexts of Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the PhD research encompass analysing the cultural politics of heritage making in specific urban districts, testing the cultural imagination of urban regeneration in terms of narrative viewpoints, and developing the framework of indicators of the sustainability policy for flourishing local collaborative cultural governance in Taiwan. 

The concepts of ‘narrating development’, ‘relational heritage’ as well as ‘networking sustainability’, will be stressed and further developed for analytical perspectives in this research. The constructive nature of heritage makes cultural legacy as relational heritage to illustrate and negotiate diverse relationships in social imagination between the past and the future, as well as the local and the global. The capability of heritage making, involving in diverse actors, could create a social space for narrating the idea of development, and then networking possible resources and sustainability; consequently, the possibility of cultural sustainability may concern sustainable development, but also culture itself. In other words, in terms of a narrative perspective, cultural sustainability involves not only the imagination of historical narratives, but also the re-organization of local cultural politics for a better future.