Heritage community identity of Shanghai Shikumen Lanes: institutional economic renewal

Against the backdrop of comprehensive urbanisation, Shanghai Shikumen Lane Housing (SLH), as a typical heritage community, is confronted with multiple dilemmas, including an imbalance between conservation and development, ambiguous property rights, and the erosion of community identity. Existing studies have predominantly focused on physical transformation while overlooking the underlying institutional logic. Using institutional economics, this paper analyzes property rights evolution and regeneration contradictions by way of historical, dual-track, and matrix analyses. Findings show that the separation of rights and responsibilities, along with dual-track misalignment, underlies building decay, community disintegration, and spatial degradation. It constructs a two-dimensional matrix and proposes four models with 11 pathways for collaborative governance. Transcending morphological perspectives, this study uncovers the institutional logic of heritage community regeneration and provides both theoretical support and practical strategies for SLH conservation and identity reorientation in stock-based urban renewal. Furthermore, it offers actionable institutional design and multi-stakeholder mechanisms, giving municipal engineering practitioners and policymakers clear tools to achieve synergies between heritage conservation, community governance, and livelihood improvement.