Page 78 - JCAU-5-4

Journal of Chinese

Architecture and Urbanism

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Comprehensive versus incremental industrial

redevelopment: The role of planning

1
2
Li Fan , Xueying Chen *, Uwe Altrock , and Zhikui Cao 2
1
1 Department of Urban Regeneration and Planning Theory, University of Kassel, Kassel, Hessen,
Germany
2 School of Design, Zhijiang College of Zhejiang University of Technology, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Theoretical and Practical Innovations in Relation to
China’s Urban Regeneration)

Abstract

Urban planning has been pivotal in shaping China’s urban landscape since the early
2000s, with statutory plans regulating every detail of urban land. However, this
planning-led development approach has proven inadequate for the redevelopment
of inner-city industrial land, necessitating alternative approaches. To explore this issue,
a comprehensive study was conducted, analyzing 395 industrial land redevelopment
projects in four districts of Shanghai (Hongkou District, Putuo District, Yangpu District,
and Jing’an District). Surprisingly, nearly half of these projects deviated from the
established land use plans, indicating the emergence of an alternative (semi-)informal
practice-led approach, specifically tailored to incremental industrial redevelopment.
*Corresponding author:
Xueying Chen This study aims to dissect and compare the redevelopment processes under both
(snowyfirefly@hotmail.com) approaches, examine the shifting role of planning as the alternative (re)development
approach emerges, and address its legitimate issues. Key arguments presented
Citation: Fan, L., Chen, X.,
Altrock, U., & Cao, Z. (2023). include (i) challenges faced by the conventional planning-led development approach
Comprehensive versus incremental due to shifting national urban redevelopment strategies, paving the way for the
industrial redevelopment: The role emergence of an alternative approach in inner-city redevelopment; (ii) the Shanghai
of planning. Journal of Chinese
Architecture and Urbanism, local government’s choice not to restructure the existing conformist urban planning
5(4):0433. system to accommodate land redevelopment demands, maintaining an ambiguous
https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0433 stance on the legitimacy of the practice-led redevelopment to retain the flexibility and
Received: April 13, 2023 discretionary authority of local government officials in decision-making; and (iii) due
Accepted: September 8, 2023 to their legitimate issues, incremental redevelopment projects executed through the
practice-led approach may eventually be replaced by comprehensive planning-led
Published Online: December 15, redevelopment projects. Consequently, the former assumes a subordinate role to the
2023
latter and is viewed as temporary land reuse practices. Despite the observed emergence
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s). of the practice-led approach in industrial redevelopment in Shanghai, it is deemed not
This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the yet robust enough to offer a viable alternative path for inner-city redevelopment.
Creative Commons Attribution-
Non-Commercial 4.0 International
(CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits all Keywords: Urban planning; Urban redevelopment; Shanghai; Industrial land
non-commercial use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is
properly cited.
1. Introduction
Publisher’s Note: AccScience
Publishing remains neutral with The urban planning system in China is predominantly characterized by a regulatory (or
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional zoning) framework. In this system, statutory plans play a pivotal role in determining
affiliations the land and space uses within a designated statutory area for the subsequent several

Volume 5 Issue 4 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0433