Florence took part of the international webinar workshop Dialogue on Winter Olympic Games: From Beijing to Milan: Design Innovations for Sustainability, organized by Tsinghua University with the collaboration of Politecnico di Milano, in May 12 2022. She presented a contribution with the title “Uses of Cultural Heritage: The iconic case of Shougang”. This contribution was part of the Dialogue on Event Legacy & Public Space, moderated by Liu Jian (Tsinghua University).

The presentation compares meanings and values of the cultural heritage of Qianmen, Shougang and Zhangjiagou–Chongli/Yanqing and their impacts on the urban and social transformation of the Beijing mega-city region. She argues that the transition to postmodernity characterized by new forms of cultural and tourist consumption in China is paradoxically based on the importance of heritage and the past in general for the implementation of more qualitative urbanism. The rehabilitated old steel city-factory, Shougang, was taken as an iconic example. As part of the colossal and questionable investments generated by the Olympics, this site offers a new vision of the urban development in the Chinese capital. As far as social change is concerned, Shougang also shows to what extent the Chinese state’s tendency to shape social models of lifestyle and consumption is at work, although for the moment it is primarily aimed at an urban elite.