Design Sensitivity as a Decision Tool for Incremental Urban Village Renewal: Weicun Village, Nanchang, China

Urban village renewal in China increasingly requires decision tools that can identify where incremental design intervention should be prioritized. However, existing renewal practices often rely on experience-based judgment and lack a reproducible quantitative framework for comparing renewal demand with implementation difficulty. This study proposes an urban village design sensitivity evaluation system based on two operational dimensions: renewal demand and implementation difficulty. The framework combines a multi-scale indicator system, AHP–entropy weighting, normalized scoring, and a linear difference model to evaluate design sensitivity at the building, street and alleyway, and public-space levels. Taking Weicun Village in Wuligang, Nanchang, China, as a case study, the method identifies 407 building units, 26 core street and alleyway units, and 30 public-space plot units, with 20 road nodes used to support traffic network interpretation. After correcting the indicator-code correspondence and recalculating the supplementary dataset, the results classify spatial units into five sensitivity levels; 10 building units, 5 street and alleyway units, and 5 public-space units are identified as high-sensitivity units. These high-sensitivity areas are mainly concentrated around historically protected buildings and public-space areas with strong renewal demand but relatively lower implementation difficulty. The proposed system provides quantitative support for renewal sequencing, differentiated intervention, and low-disruption micro-renewal decision-making.