From Systemic Gridlock Toward Adaptive Governance: Place-Based Micro-Renewal in a Resource-Constrained Historic District and Its Implications for Urban Resilience

Resource-constrained cities often face aging infrastructure, fragmented governance, ecological risks, and limited public finance. These pressures are acute in historic districts, where heritage protection overlaps with residents’ everyday needs. This study examines a place-based micro-renewal project in Xiangtan, a resource-constrained legacy industrial city in central China, where urban renewal practices have received national-level recognition. It asks how micro-renewal can reconfigure blocked relations within a local urban system and whether these changes exhibit features associated with adaptive governance under fiscal and spatial constraints. The study combines the socio-ecological-technical systems (SETS) framework with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and draws on institutional archives, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The findings identify three mechanisms: informal coordination, pragmatic recombination of institutional and technical resources, and cross-scale feedback between local implementation and higher-level review. These mechanisms helped reconnect fragmented actors and resources and enabled local adjustment during project implementation. The observed patterns of coordination, feedback, and adjustment are consistent with features of adaptive governance, while their contribution to durable adaptive capacity and longer-term urban resilience requires further longitudinal evidence. This study contributes to urban systems research by showing how place-based micro-renewal can reconfigure fragmented institutional, technical, and material relations during implementation in resource-constrained historic districts.