Reconstruction, adaptive reuse and preservation of industrial heritage in Shanghai

Since the 1990s, “withdrawing secondary industry and promoting tertiary industry” has become a main strategy of industrial restructuring in Shanghai. Correspondingly, industrial sites in inner city have undergone tremendous transformation. After the initial phase of mass demolition and mass new construction, brownfield regeneration in Shanghai has shifted towards a more cautious approach of treating existing structure since the 2010s. Large scale of industrial sites, even not listed as cultural monuments, have been renovated and reused instead of redevelopment for commercial and residential purposes, which was often the case in the 1980s and 1990s. The paper presents various approaches of dealing with industrial heritage and argued that in recent decade adaptive reuse has been given higher priority than other approaches of dealing with industrial heritage, such as demolition and relocation. In the waves of redevelopment in the early 2000s, only few extraordinary buildings were kept while the rest of the factory buildings was demolished. The site of World Expo 2010 was such an example. In other cases, historical buildings were relocated from the original site and reconstructed to give way for real estate high-rise buildings. Recently, more and more large scale industrial sites have been completely kept and reused for mixed use of business, commercial and cultural purposes, so-called creative parks. Besides creative parks, an ongoing project is to develop an industrial site along the Huangpu River to an industrial park.