The redevelopment and transformation of industrial land has become an important part of urban renewal in China. This study adopts a spatial perspective to investigate the transformation of industrial land in Shenzhen based on a set of reliable data of all urban redevelopment projects of industrial land from 2010 to 2018. Research shows that the development of the real estate market, local government’s strategic demand for upgrading industrial structure, and the policy objective of improving land use intensity are important factors that affect the industrial land transformation. Industrial land has decreased significantly in urban renewal. About 881.79 ha (76.82%) of industrial land has been transformed into commercial, residential, and new industrial spaces. The planned industrial space is mainly located in the central and western regions, while the new commercial and residential spaces are mainly located outside the Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Redevelopment of industrial land has also transferred a certain scale of land to local governments for providing public facilities with an uneven spatial distribution between SEZ and non-SEZ. Therefore, industrial land transformation has brought significant effects on the urban spatial structure of this city. The study concludes with an evaluation of current industrial land redevelopment activities and provides suggestions for sustainable land development in the future.

The recent economic advances made by China have now obliged the country to address the need for sustainable urban redevelopment. Unlike other recently developed areas in China, urban villages are in dire need of improvement. Consequently, the redevelopment of urban villages has garnered considerable public and academic interest. However, a comprehensive understanding is lacking on the drivers of urban village redevelopment in China. This study aims to fill this gap through a comprehensive survey of existing literature on redevelopment of urban villages. A total of 167 papers have been retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database. A bibliometric analysis and a critical content analysis are conducted on the bases of these papers. We found at least three main processes which have driven urban village redevelopment in China. First, the growth of urban population and their income level has created a strong emerging demand to improve urban living conditions, which has triggered the restructuring of urban villages with sub-standard built environment into high-quality urban spaces. Second, from the production side, the market-oriented land reforms and the developers’ pursuit of land-related investment returns from land rent gap is also a strong driving force for demolition and redevelopment of urban villages. Lastly, the states and local governments have played a critical role in promoting urban village redevelopment and integrating informal urban spaces into formal urban areas. This research concludes with an evaluation of current studies on urban village redevelopment and provides suggestions for further research in the future.

There is an obvious imbalanced regional development among eastern, central, and western China. This is also a fundamental problem that policy makers and planners need to address. Specific to urban development, we wondered whether there were regional differences in urban sprawl and whether this trend was under control. By using the urban sprawl index (USI), this paper investigated the spatiotemporal pattern of urban sprawl from 2006 to 2019, and its regional difference and convergence among eastern, central, and western China. It finds that the cities with high, medium, and low sprawl in the east and west regions are distributed with a clear geographical pattern, while the distribution in the central region has no intuitive geographical features. Also, the proportion of cities with high sprawl in the eastern region is more than that in the other regions, with low sprawl in central China and medium sprawl in the western region. Moreover, urban sprawl in all three regions showed a downward trend, but this process was fluctuating and had obvious phase characteristics. It can be concluded that there is a convergence trend in urban sprawl in China over the research period, and the club convergence effect exists in the eastern, central, and western regions.