Urban regeneration governance (URG) has become a popular issue in academia, politics and civil society because it has a significant influence on the success of urban regeneration activities. However, a comprehensive review on URG has yet to be produced, which hinders providing references to developing appropriate governance arrangements. Therefore, this study selected 88 relevant literatures from 1990 to 2019 to conduct a critical review. The goal of this review is to conceptualize URG, refine the signature elements of URG, compare the main modes of URG, and analyze the influential factors of URG. As a decision-making mode or a partnership, URG consists of three elements—partner, power and procedure—and influenced by three factors, the plan, place and person. There are three main modes of URG and each has pros and cons. Based on a comprehensive review, this paper concludes some findings and draws an 8p model that can provide an analysis framework for decision makers. Finally, four avenues for future research are proposed.

Most Chinese cities have spent decades achieving urbanisation. So far, rural urbanisation has shifted to urban renewal. However, the distinction between a rapidly changing social environment and the establishment of an institution has led to the failure of urban renewal policies to sustainably achieve complete transformation through urban modernisation involving many stakeholders. Owing to the top-down political system in China, the formulation and implementation of urban renewal policies are carried out in a closed-loop process in which “decisions are issued by the central government to the local government which gives feedback to the centre”. This seems to affect urban renewal through a transfer of renewal policies in a local area. Therefore, it is essential to explore the differences between the urban renewal policies at different government levels and to analyse these policies in diverse urban contexts with multiple stakeholders. Based on the policy transfer theory, this paper selects 216 core policy texts at the state level and at the level of four first-tier cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen), and uses the methods of text mining and semantic analysis to form open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. Furthermore, it discusses the policy transfer and impact mechanism of urban renewal policy at different levels with diverse characteristics of policy subsystems. We found that the transfer of urban renewal policy occurred in China through top-down coercive vertical transfer, bottom-up combination reverse transfer, and voluntary horizontal transfer among cities. Finally, we suggest that “inspiration”-type policy transfer is an effective method to promote urban renewal in China.

Off-site construction (OSC) is an innovative construction method. However, OSC is not widely applied in residential buildings due to many barriers. Therefore, this paper aims to unravel this puzzle and interpret the slow development of OSC. The paper develops a new analytical lens based on the ecosystem concept. By deconstructing some ecosystem concepts, the paper conceptualizes China’s residential building industry ecosystem (RBI-ECO) and proposes three hypotheses. The results show that the current structure of RBI-ECO does not support OSC development. Firstly, the performance of different types of enterprises is imbalanced. Secondly, there is a lack of cooperation between enterprises except for daily communication of projects. Moral risks, competition, and a fragmented supply chain are the primary causes. These barriers in RBI-ECO limit the implementation of OSC. In order to promote the application of OSC, the government can implement mandatory policies and concrete measures, establish a designer-led mechanism, motivate enterprises to transform into comprehensive enterprises, and enhance learning and education for OSC enterprise managers.

Off-site construction as one of the important directions for the transformation and upgrading of the construction industry, became more and more popular. However, not all companies are able to change successfully and achieve the desired goal, which is closely related to the transformation of enterprises and adopted. This paper aims to obtain the best transformation path of various enterprises, and introduce a correct direction for the enterprises who are follow-up to be engaged in the off-site construction, by (1) collect the successful enterprises in the transformation of the off-site construction in China; (2) deeply excavate and analyze the transformation process of these enterprises; (3) summarize the transformation path, and analysis the utility of various transformation path. The research shows that there are five kinds of transformation paths in Chinese off-site construction enterprises, among which linear and homogeneous transition are the common paths. At the same time, due to the different business characteristics, there is often the best transition path for different types of enterprises.