Palmioli Portrait Corrected1

Dr Andrea Palmioli

Assistant Professor in Architecture

 

Andrea Palmioli, Assistant Professor in Architecture, has studied the urbanisation of rural areas in China for more than ten years and brings a new direction for heritage resource management in China. 

Born in the Umbria region in Italy, he received his architectural education in the city of Venice, a city renowned for its architecture and artwork. Since he was young, Andrea was determined to study architecture because he found it a frontier subject which engaged with many other disciplines. He graduated at the Iuav University of Venice, one of the first historical Architecture schools in Italy. After this, he moved to Paris and studied a postgraduate programme related to research in urban design and planning at ENSAPB, currently ranked as the best architecture school in France. Prior to that, he went to Dresden in Germany and Russia for academic exchanges. He has also been exchanging student at Tongji University in Shanghai and at the College of Architecture in Fuzhou, Fujian. His research focus gradually moved to the urbanisation of Chinese megalopolises.

Dr Andrea Palmioli holds many roles as an architect, product designer, researcher, and photographer. Taking all of these roles into account, Andrea is most likely to define himself a researcher, particularly in the field of urbanism. Urbanism is a significant discipline focused on the study and development of how inhabitants of urban areas interact with the built environment. It is also a multidisciplinary and incorporates architecture, sociology, geography, economics and ecology. Over the past ten years, Andrea has been dedicated to the study of urbanism with a particular focus on the urbanisation of mega urban regions in China.
Andrea设计的柜子
 

Cabinets system designed by Andrea Palmioli


Andrea has been a UKNA Fellow, awarded with the Marie Curie Scholarship. The Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) is the largest global academic network on Asian cities, consisting of over 120 researchers with affiliations at numerous institutes in Europe, Asia and the US. In 2021, he was awarded the NSFC General Programme grant with his project titled “Identifying Rural Cultural Landscape from Village Place Names: Mapping for ‘Ecological Civilisation’ in the Lower Yangzi Delta” for a total of RMB 620,000 funding.

He claimed that there has been a major shift towards developing sustainable economic and cultural landscapes in China, especially in rural areas. “Innovative new tools that can apply the principles of landscape ecology are needed to achieve a new emphasis on so called ‘ecological civilisation’, including heritage preservation and the management of mixed-use hybrid rural landscapes. Emergence of the concept of ecological civilisation in China marks a shift away from industrial civilisation towards a focus on economic, socio-cultural and environmental sustainability in regional development and urbanisation.”

In this regard, the study of toponyms (place names) can help identify features of the cultural and ecological landscapes, as they represent an important inheritance of local knowledge concerning geographical transformations accumulated through prolonged interactions between local communities and the environment.

Dr Palmioli’s study, by mapping the ethnophysiographical characteristics of rural landscapes via linguistic consideration of toponyms, proposes a new direction in heritage resource management in China. A new direction in which cultural and natural landscapes are integrated in a manner that reflects historical Chinese traditions and aligns with the goals of an ecological civilisation.

 

DimSum_Cultural Landscapes UNESCO-WHITRAP Seminar
 

Andrea Palmioli at WHITRAP Tongji with students from City University of Hong Kong

Dr Andrea Palmioli holds two PhD degrees, a PhD in Urbanism from the IUAV University of Venice and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Paris-Est. He has studied and lectured in many European countries and has experience working internationally. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at City University in Hong Kong, and a Visiting Teaching and Research Fellow at The University of Hong Kong. He has also worked at Shanghai Academy of Social Science and at the University of Tianjin as the UKNA fellow.

 

After joining UNNC, he took on the new role of director of the Urban Innovation Lab (UIL), a research incubator and platform engaging scholars and practitioners to expand cross-disciplinary inquiries of contemporary urban dynamics envisioning scenarios crucial to tackling the ecological transition. He also helped to expand UIL’s collaboration and partnerships with European universities.

Dr Andrea Palmioli emphasises teamwork which he believes is key to architecture. He would like to engage students with case studies and encourage them to actively reflect on their experience in architectural design. The Urban Innovation Lab also provides students with research opportunities. Through research projects, they will gain research experience and develop their critical thinking skills.

Dr Andrea Palmioli loves music and nature. When talking about his hobbies, it is perhaps surprising to learn that during his time in Europe, he used to pick mushrooms and do fly fishing on the weekends. He also enjoys visual annotations, recording his life in China. He regards China as a beautiful country and as a great civilisation. He believes that it is only in China where such incredible transformations could ever happen.