Prof Marinelli joins four-year architectural heritage project in Tianjin

Professor Maurizio Marinelli, co-lead of the Asia Prosperity Hub at the Institute for Global Prosperity, is part of a research team led by Prof. Aoki Nobuo and Prof. Xu Subin, School of Architecture, Tianjin University, that has been awarded a four-year grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (国家自然科学基金, NSFC). Professor Aoki Nobuo is the Director of the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation of Tianjin University.

The grant will serve to produce a digital platform showing the correlation of historic districts in the Chinese port-city of Tianjin. The project will build on the concept of historic urban landscape.

Marinelli’s role will be to undertake documentary collection and analysis of the historical districts’ transformation over time, with particular attention to the sources available in the UK and Italy, then matching these with the Chinese sources.

The team will present the new research project at the International Symposium on Low-Carbon and Sustainable Built Environment in Shanghai on 1-3 November 2024, where Marinelli will also present a scholarly paper entitled ‘Urban Prosperity and Heritage Value Creation in Tianjin’.

- Prof Maurizio Marinelli

Marinelli, who's recently been nominated a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Tianjin, has been focusing his research on the socio-spatial transformation and geographies of the urban, and his work has just been published as part of a Special Issue for the esteemed academic journal Built Heritage. He contributed to this Issue with an Introduction 'Tianjin: history, memory, and heritage in a hyper-colonial-globalising port-city', a single-authored article on ‘The politics of heritage in a river-city: imperial, hyper-colonial, and globalising Tianjin’, and a co-authored article with Tianjin University PhD candidate Wang Jingting entitled ‘Tianjin’s Italian-Style town: the conundrum between conservation practices and heritage value’.

His work has inspired one of his former students, Liu Xiaochen, who completed the MSc in Prosperity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in 2023, to turn her dissertation into a thought-provoking article  on 'The effects of commercialisation on urban heritage in Tianjin: a study of citizens’ livelihood in the Five Avenues (Wudadao) historical district'.