Abstract
For the past three decades, Shanghai’s urban renewal has been characterised by the so-called ‘massive demolition and reconstruction’ and urban expansion. These approaches have produced the dual problems of inner-city neighbourhood deterioration due to the lack of investment and maintenance as well as land resource constraints for new developments. To counter these problems, recent urban regeneration in Shanghai highlights a more organic approach and promotes the people-oriented ideal. This emphasis on improving the quality of urban space and urban life is also considered key to achieving Shanghai’s ‘excellent global city’ vision outlined in the Shanghai 2035 city master plan. Against this backdrop, ‘micro-regeneration’ emerges as a new urban regeneration approach that not only upgrades the physical public spaces in and around inner-city neighbourhoods but also symbolises the attention to citizens’ most urgent and everyday needs. This paper discusses how public space is produced through micro-regeneration, an essentially public-led planning and design experiment featuring introducing professionals to communities in need, and what opportunities and challenges this ongoing experiment presents to the design and planning professionals. Drawing on primary and secondary data collected in 2019 on a variety of micro-regeneration projects, most notably those in the ‘Walking in Shanghai’ community public space micro-regeneration scheme, this paper adopts a process-oriented approach to public space research (van Melik and Spierings, 2020) and analyses the processes of the micro-regeneration of public space through the lens of place-shaping continuum (Carmona, 2014). Through the discussion of the context in which micro-regeneration emerges, the stakeholder relation, and the resultant design, development, use and management processes of the selected projects, the paper argues that micro-regeneration is not only innovative design experiments in confronting spatial and community governance problems but is also deeply interwoven with the people-oriented narrative of the ongoing urban regeneration, creating a blurry distinction between the real and symbolic participation and citizen empowerment. This in turn poses both opportunities and challenges for design and planning professionals in their new role as the facilitator/negotiator in community participation and regeneration. Although the mechanism of micro-regeneration is presently unique to Shanghai and a few other Chinese cities, this case could enrich the global research landscape of participatory design, community planning and citizen empowerment.
