The Changing Policy Agenda of Industrial Heritage Governance in Shanghai, 2006–2025: Land Use, Adaptive Reuse and Urban Regeneration

In the context of urban regeneration and the redevelopment of existing urban land and built assets, industrial heritage has become a cross-sectoral policy issue involving heritage conservation, spatial reuse, land governance and public cultural uses. Existing studies have primarily examined individual adaptive reuse projects and spatial strategies, whereas the long-term evolution of policy texts has received less systematic attention. Taking Shanghai as a case study, this paper constructs a clause-level corpus of industrial heritage-related policies issued between 2006 and 2025. The corpus comprises 524 clauses extracted from 86 policy documents covering heritage conservation, historic building conservation, cultural and creative industries, land use, planning, urban renewal and industrial tourism. Overall and stage-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) models are combined with cross-period topic alignment to identify the structure and evolution of policy themes. The results show that Shanghai’s industrial heritage policies have been shaped not only by heritage conservation concerns, but also by industrial land governance, the transformation of underused industrial land, the regeneration of existing industrial spaces (EIS), industrial culture, tourism and public service provision. Four stages are identified: initial exploration, regulatory consolidation, revitalisation and renewal, and integrated consolidation. Across these stages, four major evolutionary pathways can be observed: industrial land supply and governance, renewal of EIS and old industrial areas (OIA), industrial heritage conservation and value recognition and the expansion of industrial culture, tourism and public services. The paper provides clause-level evidence for understanding industrial heritage governance in China’s urban regeneration context and highlights the need for stronger coordination between heritage, land, planning, industry, culture and tourism policies.