Submission Deadline: 01 March 2026
Guest editor for the Special Issue
Cheng-Yi Lin
Professor, Department of Social and Regional Development, National Taipei University of Education
Chih-Hung Wang
Professor, Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University
June Wang
Associate Professor, Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong
While the low fertility rate, aging society, and outmigration have challenged the demographic trends of urban and rural development, governments are launching strategic plans to integrate public resources and the private sector to attract young entrepreneurs to invest in regional revitalization of left-behind places. Regional revitalization is a comprehensive policy concept aimed at reconfiguring locality, daily life, cultural economy, and regional development through stylized local governance strategies. These strategies include establishing project offices and regional support centers, revitalizing public spaces, creating youth empowerment stations and co-learning hubs, and organizing various forums, marketplaces, educational programs, and international exchanges. These governance strategies also encourage local university outreach programs and collaboratively mobilize young entrepreneurs, non-profit community organizations, and residents to revitalize place-specific cultural resources to change the developmental trajectory of left-behind places.
Despite the significant role of cultural strategies, forms, and content that has been presented in various publications, master plans, and policy documents, current cultural governance scholars have underexplored the role of cultural strategies in regional revitalization. Cultural strategy refers to the revitalization of different cultural resources—including cultural heritage, festivals, and local cultural industries—infrastructuring an ongoing process of regional revitalization. It aims to deploy heterogeneous material, spatial, environmental, and social elements to reconfigure spatial arrangements, the environment, and local networks by introducing creative and innovative entrepreneurial activities, organizations, and project funding. Regional revitalization projects, for instance, leverage local cultural resources to build place-based identities and branding, foster cross-regional collaborations and international cultural exchanges, and promote public participation. These strategic practices eventually create place-specific conditions that stimulate local entrepreneurship and engage immigrants and residents in reshaping the territorial qualities of living. Specific practices include documenting local history and cultural narratives; revitalizing historic streets, buildings, and industrial heritage sites; reinterpreting traditional crafts and local industries; organizing cultural festivals, cultural tours, and experiential activities to promote local identity and place branding; and establishing various organizations and networks for regional revitalization to facilitate employment, entrepreneurship, and knowledge exchange among in-migrants and local communities. While these cultural strategies and practices have become increasingly normalized, critical questions remain less explored: How do these cultural strategies and imaginations emerge, initiate, and evolve? What are the mechanisms and impacts of cultural strategy?
Moreover, regional revitalization represents a dynamic global cultural policy mobility, learning, and local adaptation process. While these initiatives have attracted significant participation from local organizations and young entrepreneurs, local practitioners often mobilize the discourse of Japanese regional revitalization strategies alongside endogenous community-building experiences to cultivate local authenticity in cultural and economic activities, festivals, and place-based cultural industries. However, while global cultural policy concepts are mobilized to shape local contexts, several critical questions remain underexplored regarding the effectiveness of these efforts in revitalizing local economies and reversing demographic trends. Key questions include: Are these cultural forms, strategies, and policies overly reliant on Japanese models, making them unembedded in local conditions? Do local entrepreneurship and relocation paradigms promote a specific lifestyle that aligns less with local authenticity? Do these initiatives prioritize high-profile arts and cultural events while neglecting deeper engagement with local traditions and practices? Moreover, to what extent do stylized cultural strategies effectively address existing socio-cultural challenges such as unequal access to public services, inadequate elderly care, regional market decline, socio-cultural power dynamics, and resource distribution structures within local communities?
As a cultural strategy, regional revitalization must critically evaluate its long-term consequences and future directions. Beyond the top-down governance framework of cultural policy, it is necessary to reflect on bottom-up mobilization in regional revitalization—whether these efforts constitute an alternative cultural strategy that integrates physical and cultural infrastructure and the adaptive reuse of cultural assets while fostering diverse economies and community-based practices. We argue that this shift in cultural strategy extends beyond government-led cultural facility construction, positioning regional revitalization as an ongoing infrastructuring process. This transformation relies on policy funding and systematic agencies that drive institutional change, strengthen place-based leadership, and empower stakeholders to leverage place-specific cultural resources dynamically.
Based on this understanding of regional revitalization and cultural strategies, we invite papers from interdisciplinary academic fields, both Taiwan and international cases, to explore the dynamic complexities of cultural strategies, policy discourses, case studies, strategic models, and critical alternative approaches associated with regional revitalization in Taiwan and other countries. We welcome scholars to examine how different actors—including national governments, academic communities, and local practitioners—utilize cultural resources, organizational mechanisms, and strategies to produce specific outcomes and impacts of regional revitalization.
Suggested Topics:
- Rethinking regional revitalization practices and case studies
- The governance complexities of cultural strategies in regional revitalization
- The management of cultural heritage and the representation of material culture in regional revitalization
- Agency and entrepreneurship in regional revitalization
- The role of the University Outreach Program in regional revitalization
- The deployment of artistic performances and cultural festivals in regional revitalization
- Cross-cultural exchanges in the discourse, policy, and practice of regional revitalization
- Hidden challenges, tensions, and conflicts in cultural strategies for regional revitalization
- Social impact assessments of cultural strategies in regional revitalization
Submission Guidelines
Academic Research Papers submissions of 5,000-10,000 words in English and 12,000-20,000 words in Chinese) with the Authors Profile submission form for CPME (please refer to the journal website http://cpme.tacps.tw) should be emailed, as Microsoft Word attachments, to T3CPME at cpme@tacps.tw by 1st March 2026 in CMS Style. All research articles will go through a double-blind peer review procedure. The Special Issue is planned to be published in May 2027.
Book Reviews, Art Critiques, Curating Critiques, Policy Reviews (between 1,000 to 1,500 words in English) & Case Reports or Forum Notes (within 3,000 words in English) related to the current theme of “Cultural Strategies for Regional Revitalization” will also be welcome. All review articles and case reports will be evaluated internally by the CPME Editorial Board.
CPME is a high quality, open access, peer-reviewed Chinese and English languages journal published dually online and in print by Taiwan Association of Cultural Policy Study (TACPS) every May and November. The journal follows the standard for Ethics and Publication Malpractice set by the COPE.