Urban renewal in China with the transition to high-quality development: Challenges and paths

Urbanization in China has transitioned from an era of urban construction focused on incremental land development to an era of urban renewal focused on stock land development. Implementing urban renewal and achieving high-quality development has become a significant challenge for urban development in the second half of China's urbanization process. In response to this challenge, experts and scholars from relevant academic fields were invited to explore and discuss the fundamental issues of how urban renewal should be implemented under the new historical conditions and value orientations. The key aspects and solution pathways of this issue were discussed, with a focus on the following areas: the institutional and strategic issues that impact urban renewal, the practical and technical questions of how urban renewal is carried out, and the potential negative effects arising from urban renewal. The paper has extensive discussions and reflections on these topics. Based on the main viewpoints of the invited experts, urban renewal under the background of high-quality development transformation needs to pay attention to the following key issues. First of all, the goals of urban renewal should be determined synthetically with the full consideration of the national development strategies pertaining to urban development, with the effort to promote the innovation of urban renewal system in the areas of spatial planning, land supply and management, development models, financing, and public participation. Second, it is suggested that new models of urban renewal driven by the combined efforts of government, market, and society needs to be established to ensure the publicness, efficiency, and fairness of urban renewal projects. In particular, the government should play a role of guiding and encouraging through decentralization and empowerment; the role of market should pay attention to the advantages of cooperation between private capital and state-owned enterprise capital; the society should play a role by activating the subjective role of property rights owners. Third, with the aim to promote a people-centered development, the damage of urban renewal to historical and cultural protection and adverse effects of gentrification it brings should be regulated and avoided. There is a need to enhance exploration of the urban renewal models beneficial to historical and cultural protection and social justice. This paper concludes by calling on scholars from multiple disciplines including geography, resources and environmental sciences, planning, and management to jointly promote research of urban renewal theories that fit to the Chinese path to modernization, with the aim to make Chinese contribution to theories on global urban renewal.