User:Bea

Beatrice Ferrari

• beatrice dot ferrari at unine dot ch
• Member since 28 Jul 2006.

Bio///Beatrice Ferrari

I'm a mainly a geographer and a bit of an anthropologist, actually working as a research assistant at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the same time, I'm doing a PhD on urban change in China, trying to understand how globalization contributes to transform cities. Since my first time in China in 1998, I've been completely fascinated by the rapid changes in urban built environment. I came back in 1999 and spent a year in Beijing learning Chinese and trying to capture some of the ingredients characterizing Beijing atmosphere…
In 2005, at the end of my studies, I came back again to do some fieldwork in Beijing. Through this research, my intent was to understand how the built landscape is changing. The production and marketization of foreign residences was an interesting example to show not only how the real estate is globalizing through the contributions of foreign architects, designers, real estate agencies, building companies and of course imported architectural shapes, but also how globalization is mostly a locally defined and imagined process.
Here is the link to read the full article (only in French):
http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,41,4,20061128145116-QD/mem_FerrariB.pdf
Now, in 2007, I’m back on research again…and I continue to be interested by topics referring to architectural and building practices and savoir-faire, globalization processes in China, real estate production and world circulation of architectural and urban shapes, models and practices.

Here is my page : http://personnes.epfl.ch/beatrice.ferrari

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