Exploring Participatory Microregeneration as Sustainable Renewal of Built Heritage Community: Two Case Studies in Shanghai

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Shanghai has experienced massive urban development and renewal as ways to respond to its demographic, economic, and living space needs. Previous policies have led to the demolishment of many historical communities and valuable heritage housing. The existing ones continue to face extreme threats, such as bad physical conditions and the marginalization of communities. Yet there is a recent trend that emphasizes sustainable urban renewal named microregeneration (微更新), launched by municipal and local states since 2016. One of the main approaches of the initiative was to form new urban coalitions to focus on collaborative governance that helps integrate different agents’ expertise and values for more sustainable urban developments and renewals. This paper explores two cases on how this concept has emerged. The first case is An Shan Si Cun (鞍山四村). This housing block was built in the 1950s for employees of some state-owned enterprises. The second case is Jing Lao Cun (敬老邨). This alley house neighborhood was built in 1930s for migrants who came to Shanghai. Furthermore, this paper is to explore and compare their approaches to sustainable urban renewal, which attempts to preserve these communities that represent cultural and built heritage in Shanghai. Specifically, this paper examines the challenges and accomplishments of these experiments, and discusses policy implications for future tactics of sustainable urban renewal.

Contemporary Influence on the Built Cultural Heritage. Case Study Applied in the Villages of Mureș County

“…The online promotion of cultural heritage has a great impact on young people. This promotion is made much easier through social networks, which young people access frequently [9].…”

A Case Study Driven Integrated Methodology to Support Sustainable Urban Regeneration Planning and Management

“…It is nowadays well established that cities have undergone four phases of development [8][9][10][11]: (i) Urbanization; (ii) suburbanization; (iii) counter urbanization; (iv) re-urbanization. This last phase, reurbanization, was already a reality in the 1990s in the more developed countries (France [12], UK [13], USA, Canada, Australia [8] and China [14]) and gained prominence in the sequence of the global economic crisis since 2008, which led to a stagnation of suburb growth. Reurbanization is triggered as a countermeasure to the stagnation, with many cities trying to regenerate their old city centers.…”

“…According to urban-rural population projections in EU-28 (2015-50), an increase of 11.1% in predominantly urban regions (cities), a marginal increase of 0.6% in intermediate regions (towns and suburbs) and a decrease of 7.0% in predominantly rural regions are expected [17]. UR is naturally linked to sustainable urban development, and, as it will be mentioned below, together with its impacts at manifold levels, UR is also an opportunity for all the stakeholders involved [14,18,19].…”

Heritage and Sustainability: Regulating Participation

“…Despite participation being an integral part of international heritage regulation framing the linkages between heritage and sustainability, international documents seldom define it or specify the contribution of participatory practices to the sustainable development objectives [98]. Even though research today is furthering the understanding of the 'sustainability roles' of participation, primarily through case studies, comparative studies and the development of theoretical frameworks are limited [99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113]. Recent research identified three main roles of participation in achieving sustainable development objectives-participation as a right, as a driver, and as an enabler-and nine subcategories (see Figure 1) [98].…”