Urban Ecotopia? Young Farmers, Food Localism, and Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper attends to the blur of the urban-rural divide and the nature-culture dualism in an unlikely setting, Hong Kong, where the idea of “countryside” is often perceived to be irrelevant. While urban expansion persists in this city, young people wish to go back to the land and grow local food. An urban ecotopia, as it seems to be, however, is underpinned by human mobilities and resources from the downtown. Rather than withdrawing from the city, agricultural activists promote discourses regarding the co-development of urban and rural areas. Through examining the historical, cultural, political, and economic contexts of Hong Kong since colonial times, this paper argues that the changing landscape is both internationally oriented and informed by local context. The social changes involve social reforms and shifting meanings of the rural and the urban. In the process, food serves as a mediator that connects “urbanites and countrymen,” “human and the environment,” and “the local and the global.”