Join the CMS Mobilities research group for a talk on street markets, urban mobility, and how migrant communities shape and contest public space.
Street markets are vibrant sites of mobility where goods, bodies, and cultural practices circulate, continually reshaping urban life. This presentation examines the redevelopment of street markets in London and Hong Kong to explore how mobility operates not only through migratory and economic flows, but also through the reconfiguration of public space and lived urban heritage.
Drawing on comparative case studies—from Brick Lane, Brixton, and Mercato Metropolitano in London to Graham Street, Pang Jai, and dawn markets in Hong Kong—it analyses how redevelopment reflects tensions between neoliberal urbanism, spatial governance, and community resilience. Long shaped by migrant entrepreneurship and informal exchange, these markets now face pressures from gentrification and sociospatial sanitization, yet persist as spaces of attachment, negotiation, and resistance.
Conceptualizing street markets as social infrastructures of everyday mobility and living archives of urban adaptation, the presentation shows how a mobility lens reveals the affective, material, and political dynamics of contemporary urban transformation.
Maurizio Marinelli is Professor of China and Global Prosperity at The Bartlett, University College London (UCL)’s Faculty for the Built Environment. His interdisciplinary research lies at the crossroads of Chinese history, culture, and human geography, with a focus on globally significant themes such as the challenges of urbanization, heritage value, and sustainable development. He has authored four book-length projects (1999, 2007, 2014, 2019) and has published extensively on Chinese history, politics, and society. His scholarship has been featured in leading academic journals, including Theory and Society, China Information, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, Urban History, China Heritage Quarterly, and Built Heritage.
At UCL, Professor Marinelli teaches courses on Global China and Urban studies, exploring ‘prosperity’ through the lens of quality of life. He also leads the Asia Prosperity Research Hub and plays an active role in the Urban Prosperity Knowledge Network. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, International Centre for Cultural Heritage, Tianjin University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History at UBC.
