Adaptive Reuse of Industrial Heritage in Mining Towns Based on Scene Theory: A Case Study of Meitanba Town, China

Industrial heritage in resource-depleted mining towns faces the dual challenge of physical decay and social severance. To achieve sustainable urban revitalization, adaptive reuse strategies must align with local collective memory and emerging experiential consumption trends. Adopting a Scene Theory perspective, this study constructs a multi-level analytical framework using Meitanba Town (Hunan, China) and its power plant as a case study. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining semantic network analysis of 1582 online user comments with 61 offline questionnaires distributed to local residents to quantitatively diagnose current scene elements, functions, and features. The quantitative results reveal a significant imbalance: while “Functional Media” achieved the highest comprehensive score (10.0) due to strong historical recognition, “Diverse Groups” scored the lowest (3.4), indicating a lack of social inclusivity. Specifically, residents expressed the highest demand for sports facilities (31.2%) and cultural spaces (23.7%), identifying the main workshop (26.4%) and chimney as core carriers of industrial identity. Responding to these findings, the paper proposes three targeted strategies: (1) Activate: creating open-access recreation scenes to satisfy urgent sports demands; (2) Link: constructing immersive cultural scenes to narrate the “coal–electricity–life” history; and (3) Enhance: developing industry-powered commercial scenes to avoid homogenization. This study enriches the localized application of Scene Theory and provides a data-driven, context-adjustable analytical and strategic model that can inform the sustainable renewal of mining towns globally, with its specific implementation requiring adaptation to local social, economic, and cultural characteristics.