The path characteristics and social impact of Tianjin's inner-city urban regeneration during China's transition period

Since China's reform and opening-up in 1978, stock land regeneration has played an increasingly important and unique role in the evolution process of China's urban space during the transition period. However, China's urban practice has long been closely bound to the theme of economic development, which makes the domestic research on China's urban regeneration process focus on its spatial and economic dimensions while relatively ignoring its social impact. Based on high-definition satellite images and other dynamic data, this paper draws 8998 pieces high resolution land plots, and analyzes the spatio-temporal path of Tianjin's inner-city regeneration actions from 2001 to 2020. The empirical research finds that urban regeneration actions mostly occur in traditional urban areas and old industrial storage areas with rich history and culture resources, complete spatial texture, as well as significant location advantages. At the same time, large-scale demolition and reconstruction quickly triggers a systematic transformation of the functional structure of urban land use. Complex historical backgrounds such as the land finance paradigm, socioeconomic transformation, and incremental planning inertia are the external driving factors for the formation of the above characteristics; at the same time, the practice of inner-city regeneration in China during the transition period also causes complex secondary social impacts at least in three dimensions. In the social-economic dimension, the real estate development process based on stock areas has achieved large-scale wealth redistribution among inner-city citizens. In the social-space dimension, material space regeneration has triggered an overall functional reorganization, which has driven the continued agglomeration and dispersal of diverse social groups in the city. In the social-life dimension, these short-term, concentrated, and semi-mandatory demolition and reconstruction actions in traditional urban areas have fundamentally reshaped the daily lives of residents who have migrated out of the old city center. Finally, as a prospect, we believe that this research may help improve the theoretical construction of the social impact assessment and social value cognition of China's contemporary urban regeneration actions, and support the high-quality spatial planning and governance in China's future stock-development era.