Renovation of industrial heritage sites and sustainable urban regeneration in post-industrial Shanghai

ABSTRACT

The renovation of cities’ urban industrial heritage fabric is becoming increasingly recognized as an opportunity for post-industrial urban development, suggesting a complex interplay between the renovation of industrial heritage sites and urban regeneration effects in surrounding areas. However, prior research on industrial heritage renovation rarely transcends the arts-led gentrification narrative, and whether/to what extent industrial heritage renovation can catalyze sustainable urban regeneration in surrounding areas—and the driving forces underpinning that process—remains unclear, especially within the Chinese context. In this research, we focus on Shanghai’s top-down policy of renovating industrial heritage sites into locations for creative industry clusters. By comparing Yishan Road and Changyuan Districts from 2008 to 2018, we arrived at a nuanced understanding of the urban regeneration effects of industrial heritage renovation as a policy-induced gentrification model. We further concluded that the renovation of a city’s industrial heritage fabric could catalyze sustainable urban regeneration if implemented through an integrated development model that considered the physical, economic, social, and cultural aspects that resonated with the current policy and institutional system. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications in urban policy and planning discussions on the strategic value of industrial heritage renovation in post-industrial cities.

Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by Professor Zhenyu Li and Professor Huijun Tu at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University in Shanghai. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The concept of property-led regeneration developed within the British context. Property development refers to ‘‘the assembly of finance, land, building materials and labor to produce or improve buildings for occupation and investment purposes.” According to He and Wu (2005), property-led regeneration in China is characterized as follows: “Pro-growth coalitions between local government and developers are formed. Despite its capital provider, the private sector is still regulated by the government due to its negligible influence on local governance. The government controls the direction and pace of urban redevelopment through policy intervention, financial leverages, and governance of land leasing. Property-led redevelopment is driven by diverse motivations of different levels of the government, e.g., transforming urban land use functions, showing off the entrepreneurial capability of local governments, and maximizing negotiated land benefits. Driven by profit-seeking motives, some thriving urban neighborhoods are displaced by high-value property development and suffer from uneven redevelopment.”

2. The typical gentrification process involves an art- or artist-led stage, as in the case of SOHO in NYC. This stage is uncommon in the gentrification process in Chinese cities.

3. The change of land use entitlement from industrial to non-industrial in Chinese cities must follow a specific process; the land must first be purchased and held by the local government before it can be sold to a third party like, for example, a developer.

4. While the purchase cost of real estate in China is high, the holding cost in Chinese cities is relatively low, as all taxes are collected during the transfer as a one-time fee rather than an annual property tax, as is common in Western cities.

5. Twenty-seven of the 78 creative industry clusters renovated from industrial heritage stock are located within one km of Shanghai’s Inner Ring Road, six of which are in the two districts studied here (as in Figure 1).

6. The Xujiahui Commercial Center, 1 km north of Yishan Road District, is one of three municipal commercial centers in Shanghai, while North Sichuan Commercial Street (which begins at the south end of Changyuan District) is the oldest commercial area in northern Shanghai.

7. One of the traditional residential community patterns in Shanghai features lanes of houses with arterial and secondary lanes acting as public spaces.

8. Please refer to the table explaining the coding system of the interviewees in the appendix.

9. According to Wang (2009), the “three unchanging principles” were proposed to overcome legislative hurdles. Under these principles, the rehabilitation of nonfunctional production and warehouse facilities may be undertaken if the ‘‘ownership of land-use rights,” ‘‘major structure of the building,” and ‘‘nature of the land use” have remained unchanged. It is worth mentioning that issues related to land use rights fall under the purview of the Shanghai Municipal Housing, Land, and Resources Administration (SHMHLRA), while issues pertaining to land use itself fall under the jurisdiction of the Shanghai Municipal Planning Bureau (SHMPB). In other words, the SHEITC has no legal right to intervene when a rehabilitation project at a former factory site involves a change in its land use and it does not possess the right to judge whether the transfer of land use rights is required in any specific case. However, if a change in land use is interpreted as being one from “manufactory industry” to “creative industry” and the relationship between the landowner and developer is understood as being one between an owner and tenant, the two government departments, the SHMHLRA and SHMPB, defer to the ‘‘rationality” of the “three unchanging principles” and offer their full support for the ‘‘care” expressed by the municipal government.

10. The temporary reuse of industrial heritage sites before 2006 was illegal. According to the relevant laws, commercial and residential entities were strictly prohibited on industrial land, and no registration of non-manufacturing enterprises was allowed within industrial buildings. Thus, the contracts for reusing industrial buildings in the early years conferred no legal protection and were often canceled by property owners for no reason. Artists and other groups were also often driven away by local governments for reasons like the potential for safety issues.

11. According to Zheng (2010, 2011), the government’s intervention in the CCJQ’s development was clearly urban-growth oriented. The policies were rooted in the Economic Committee’s “city industry building” program and focused on the reuse of redundant industrial buildings. The policies included encouraging the relocation of manufacturing industries to the urban periphery and tailored central-city spaces (mainly industrial heritage sites) to accommodate tertiary industries, or “sanbubian wubian”, and the establishment of the Shanghai Creative Industry Center as well as a series of flagship activities and publicity institutions that were supported by local governments, etc.

12. A used in “Xujiahui Jiedao,” “Guangzhonglu Jiedao,” and “Tianlin Jiedao” in this article, “Jiedao” refers to the sub-division under the sub-municipal government in Shanghai’s administrative system.

13. Because of the existing policy constraints, an informal category of rentable industrial spaces on state-owned lands emerged for properties that would otherwise command a market price through the transfer of land-use rights (Yeh & Wu, 1996; Zhu, 2004). As a compromise, a portion of the profit is returned to the landowner, often a struggling SOE facing a financial shortfall caused by reduced monthly rental incomes (Wang, 2009).

14. In formal development proceedings, if land use rights are transferred from the state to an individual developer, a commercial land use lease typically lasts for 40 years, while a residential one lasts for 70.

15. Most of the industrial buildings in “Zhuyuan” were demolished in 2015 and a new commercial complex named Shangguang Xuhui Center was built on the original site, which includes a furniture and building material market, an office tower, and an apartment complex. (Interview Records, No. L04 and LEC8)

16. The table of “Key informants” includes 11 interviewees whose descriptions are quoted in the article. The table of “Other informants” shows all the conducted interviews during the research. The 12 local officials get a code of “LO”. The 9 local enterprise chiefs get a code of “LEC”. The 33 local artists & residents get a code of “ LAR”. The 2 experts get a code of “EX”.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is funded by NSFC projects “Research on technical system of ‘Downtown Factory’ community-oriented regeneration in Yangtze River Delta Region” (51678412), “Research on Theory and Key Technology of Urban Center District Spatial Planning Based on Big Data” (51838002), Education Research and Construction Project at Tongji University (0100104500/096); National Natural Science Foundation of China [51678412,51838002]; and Tongji University [0100104500/096].

Notes on contributors

Miao Sun

Miao Sun is a post-doc at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning in Tongji University. His expertise includes adaptive reuse of industrial heritage, urban regeneration and design. Miao Sun led the establishment of the Tongji Association for Metropolitan Regeneration. He is a member of the Architectural Society of China, a China National 1st Class Registered Architect and was Visiting Assistant in Research of Yale University. In 2020, he was selected as a fellow in the Shanghai Super Post-doc Program.

Chen Chen

Chen Chen is an associate professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University. His expertise includes urban economics, comprehensive planning, rural planning, urban regeneration and design. Chen Chen also served as deputy secretary of the Tongji University Committee of the Communist Youth League and led the establishment of the Tongji Association for Rural Revitalization. He is a member of the Youth Work Committee of the China Urban Planning Society, a member of the Youth Committee, a member of the China Urban and Rural Planning Implementation Academic Committee, and a member of New Urbanization and Urban and Rural Planning Research Committee of China Urban Science Research Association. In 2016, he was selected as a fellow in the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program. He was awarded the first prize of the Jin Jingchang China Urban Planning Outstanding Paper Award and the first prize of the China Youth Planner’s Paper Competition. His paper was selected as one of the 40 academic papers that has an impact on China’s urban and rural planning development in 40 years.