2 - Making China's Coffee Capital: Core-Periphery Regionalism of a Small Frontier City in Southwest China

In this paper, I show how a small frontier city can develop as a ‘peripheral core’ as an alternative urbanism through selected foodscapes. I take Pu’er and the development of its coffee industry as an empirical micro-scape case that illustrates the patterns of urbanism as illustrated in the foodscapes of a small frontier city. My aim is to shed light on the discursive practices and reconfiguration of urban foodscapes required to build Pu’er into ‘China’s Coffee Capital’. Accordingly, I show how its nature as a peripheral core leverages Pu’er’s spatial positioning as a rural-urban nexus in a way that allows the city to reconcile the state’s ecological modernisation regime and the economic networks that connect nano-scapes prescient to the global coffee market. While state rhetoric has emphasized its peripheral location on an ostensible pristine yet socially laggard national periphery, Pu’er has used representations of its ‘peripherality’ in the construction of its coffee-related foodscapes and networks fostered thereby to reposition itself as a core node that can attract international attention to the distinct quality of Yunan’s specialty coffee, in turn affecting further-flung coffee nano-scapes. As such, the spatial dynamic at play between “peripheral” and “core” foodscapes is no longer one of binary opposition, but instead evolves into a dialectical form of local urbanism in which the urban renewal of foodscapes core to the economy and local flavor is an engine for the renovation of the city’s rural fringes.