With the 14th Five-Year Plan for Development, China is promoting people-oriented urban regeneration for residential communities built before 2000. Evaluations of quality of life (QoL) and considerations of social sustainability must play an important role in defining people-oriented regeneration projects. Residents’ satisfaction is an important indicator of QoL and is essential for achieving socially sustainable development. To contribute to the ongoing discussion about people-oriented urban regeneration, this paper studies the correlation between QoL and social sustainability, investigating residents’ perception in high-density communities through a satisfaction evaluation approach based on the QoL index. Two high-density communities in Suzhou were analyzed: Nanhuan, a high-rise, gated community in one of the first expansions of the city in the 80s; and Daoqian, a multi-story, non-gated community in the old town. Both communities have a typical urban morphology and were selected for their exemplary characteristics. The study used a mixed research method: field investigation, on-site interviews, and a survey with over 670 questionnaires conducted and analyzed. It also applied the Structural Equation Model (SEM) to explore and define the satisfaction evaluation factors. The two communities expressed concerns about different factors: in the case of the Nanhuan community, property management and spatial scenario creation were emphasized, whereas in the case of the Daoqian community, unrestricted space mobility, poor existing conditions, and the demand for various facilities and recreation spaces were most prominent. The research found that improving community environmental quality and facilities would, as one would expect, improve residents’ satisfaction in both communities. Still, our research also clearly indicated that diversified spatial activities, currently missing in both cases, and more opportunities for social interaction would enhance residents’ satisfaction. The findings of this study offer some insights regarding socially sustainable community regeneration, as well as decision-making processes and design strategies.

China is gradually shifting towards more sustainable urban development, and the local governments are increasingly promoting social and environmentally sustainable spatial planning practices. This article debates the potential contradiction between the goal of a constantly growing urban population and the limits to the consumption of land planned by this new direction of urban development. The analysis focuses on the wealthy city of Suzhou in the Yangtse River Delta region and explores the opportunities for densification of the residential areas as a possible solution for this contradiction, as already tested by some Chinese cases for land use efficiency. The research applies GIS-based spatial analysis and identifies some of the sites that can be efficiently redeveloped in the resettlement communities for their low floor area ratio (FAR) and obsolescent conditions, which do not correspond to the increasingly middle-class status of the residents in the urban region. The article investigates the different options of a densification strategy in the frame of the policies of urban renewal promoted in China in recent years for improving the quality of the built environment.

Sustainable urban forms (SUF) guide spatial creation, significantly revitalise the development of traditional settlements, and are an essential theoretical support for urban design. At the same time, the emergence of quantitative spatial analysis technology further promotes the visualised evaluation of the performance of spatial vitality in urban design. However, current research rarely studies the spatial vitality of traditional settlements with quantitative spatial analysis from the SUF perspective. Therefore, this research takes Anren Ancient Town in Chengdu, Western China, as an example to propose a design based on sustainable urban form theory to raise local spatial vitality. Then, it introduces the vitality evaluation system based on the urban form index (UFI) with three measurement methods: Space Syntax, Spacemate, and MXI, and conducts a comparative spatial vitality evaluation of Anren Ancient Town’s status quo to explain the process of how the design scheme came about. The results found that urban design proposals based on the principles of compactness, mixed land use and diversity in SUF design guidelines can effectively improve the vitality of traditional settlements. The high vitality of an urban settlement could be achieved by combining SUF-based design guidelines and UFI-based evaluation systems. The spatial vitality evaluation system based on the SUF could assist and optimise decision-making in design and act as a paradigm for urban design or urban regeneration in traditional towns.