The Rebirth of Industrial Heritage: How the Regeneration of Historical Spaces Impacts People’s Mental and Physical Health Through Restorative Perception

This study aims to explore how industrial heritage regeneration spaces influence employees’ physical and psychological health through restorative perception. With the rapid urbanization and increasing emphasis on sustainable development, the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage sites has become a vital strategy in urban renewal. However, the impact of such spaces on people’s health remains underexplored, especially in terms of how the work environment and restorative psychological mechanisms interact. Using a cross-sectional survey design, data from 486 employees in adaptive reuse projects across major cities in China were analyzed through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Employees were chosen as the target population because they represent a group with stable, repeated, and long-term exposure to the regenerated environment during daily routines. Compared with visitors, whose exposure duration, activity purposes, and spatial routes are highly variable, employees provide a more consistent context to test the proposed restorative mechanisms. The results revealed that industrial heritage attribute perception (IHAP), including scale, materiality, historical presence, and functional transformation, significantly predicted restorative perception (β = 0.546, p < 0.001), which in turn positively influenced both psychological health (β = −0.647, p < 0.001) and physical health (β = 0.688, p < 0.001). Instrumental variable analysis using “building age” and “green coverage rate” confirmed the robustness of these findings, showing that restorative perception still significantly improved mental (β = −2.295, p < 0.001) and physical health (β = 0.528, p < 0.001) after addressing endogeneity issues. Furthermore, individual differences such as work tenure (β = 0.239, p < 0.001) and environmental sensitivity (β = 0.054, p > 0.05) moderated these effects. This study extends Attention Restoration Theory (ART) by applying it to historical industrial environments, offering both theoretical insights and practical guidance for designing adaptive reuse spaces that promote employee well-being.