Co-creating for locality and sustainability: Design-driven community regeneration strategy in Shanghai's old residential context

Abstract

Community regeneration has drawn much attention in both the urban development and sustainable design fields in the last decade. As a response to the regeneration challenges of Shanghai's old and high-density communities, this article proposes two design-driven strategies: enabling residents to become innovation protagonists and facilitating collaborative entrepreneurial clusters based on the reorganization of community resources. Two ongoing collaborative projects between the Siping community and Tongji University-Open Your Space microregeneration (OYS) and the Neighborhood of Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship Towards 2035 (NICE 2035) living labs project-are adopted as main case studies. Research findings are put forward through a structured analysis of qualitative data. Firstly, we reviewed the situation and sustainable goals for Shanghai's old residential communities, and how design-centric social innovation and collaboration can be effective interventions. Secondly, we analyzed resident empowerment approaches to decision-making, co-design, and co-management processes in OYS with participatory observation. Finally, through participants' interviews and key events analysis in NICE 2035, we investigated how living labs reuse community distributed resources to develop lifestyle-based business prototypes. The inquiry of this article proposes a co-creation mechanism and action guides towards localized and sustainable community regeneration, which can provide a contextual paradigm for similar challenges.