Sustainable Governance of Linear Industrial Heritage Landscapes: Knowledge Translation, Public Interpretation, and Spatial Differentiation Along the Jingzhang Railway, China

Sustainable governance of linear industrial heritage involves not only the preservation of physical fabric, but also the dynamic coordination of historical meaning, continued use, spatial transformation, and public participation. Taking the Jingzhang Railway as a case, this study draws on participatory heritage conservation and knowledge translation to examine the relationships among institutional framing, professional knowledge translation, public interpretation, and spatial differentiation. The analysis integrates 13 policy and planning documents, 119 academic publications, and 27,646 valid Weibo posts, using TF-IDF, CiteSpace, LDA, MacBERT-based emotion classification, and cross-corpus interpretive comparison. The findings show that the institutional positioning of the Jingzhang Railway has expanded from statutory protection toward conservation-and-use integration, urban renewal, regional coordination, and public-space development, while professional discourse translated these objectives into operational heritage practices centred on corridors, heritage parks, spatial renewal, and interpretive nodes. Across the 2022 observation boundary, transport and engineering meanings remained persistent, while themes of historical memory, commemoration, spatial renewal, and public experience became more prominent. In the emotion analysis, neutral expression accounted for 68.21% of the full corpus and joy for 17.17%; at Qinglongqiao, the joy-classified share increased from 21.9% to 30.7%, illustrating node-level differentiation in affective expression. Based on these findings, the study proposes a recursive governance framework of institutional framing, professional translation, public interpretation, and adaptive feedback. It further argues that participatory heritage conservation should be understood as an ongoing process of interpretation, negotiation, and feedback among plural heritage values, professional knowledge, and locally situated public meanings. For linear industrial heritage, sustainable governance therefore requires both the maintenance of corridor-scale historical continuity and differentiated conservation and reuse pathways that respond to the spatial, functional, and social contexts of individual nodes.