Chiyi Tam

Bio

Bio


Chiyi Tam 譚奇一 is an urban planner and anti-displacement organizer based in Tkaronto's Chinatown. Chiyi is the Managing Director and co-founder of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust. Her goal is to return knowledge into community ownership; and support communities working to turn property back into land. She frequently supports groups from all corners of turtle island exploring community ownership and community wealth building as an anti-displacement strategy for racial & economic justice.

Full Bio Cont’d


In Chinese tradition, the name Chiyi 奇一 follows the Tam 譚 clan ancestral poem, indicating her place of belonging in the 91st generation from the Five-Tam clan villages and river system. In this line, she is the third generation to be displaced to trade-colonial Hong Kong‘s Rennie's Mill, and later, today’s settler-colonial Canada. Maternally, she is from generations of mixed Tibetan-Han community rooted on Chongqing’s beautiful Southwestern University campus. In both lines, she comes from land-based philosophers, theologians and architects, which is a tradition she inherits in her approach to understanding the settler property system she works through today.

She was the first staff and executive director of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust, where she acquired the organization’s first building acquisition, and continues to be a close collaborator. Prior to joining the community land trust movement, she had a decade of experience working in social enterprise start-ups, research, legislation and incubation - most notably the student renegade project UBC Farm, and the Department of International Development at Oxford University. Chiyi has served on the advisory boards of Montreal Chinatown’s JIA Foundation, BC’s Union Cooperative Initiative, and the first elected board of the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts.

She leads a public course on community land trusts with the Esturary Institute. She co-developed “Planning and Designing for Community Power” with long time collaborator Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie, a graduate course at the University of Toronto. She has delivered keynote speeches reflecting on the moment we are working in together, for the Canadian Community Economic Development Network and the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts.

She has been recognised for her work in urban planning and the community land trust movement as an Early Career Canadian Urban Leader by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, the Rosemary Brown Racial Justice Award and more recently with the Distinguished Leadership Award by the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Her work has been featured on the South China Morning Post, CBC, CTV, Global News, Toronto Today, West End Pheonix, the Greenline, and most importantly to her - the now-shuttered MingPao Canada.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Land and Food Systems from the University of British Columbia, and a Masters of Science in Planning from the University of Toronto. Her work as a student was recognized by the Bob Fletcher Endowment; the Walter G. Hardwick Scholarship in Urban Studies; Peter R. Walker Fellowship; Matthew W.F. Hanson Scholarship and Edie Yolles Award.