In the context of the global fine-grained urban renewal initiative, living streets closely related to people’s lives have become a hot topic. This study provides a comprehensive framework for addressing prominent issues such as the limited adaptability and inability to accommodate development in living streets. It explores the value and design innovation points of incorporating resilience concepts in the renewal of living streets. Taking the living streets in Yixing, Jiangsu Province, as an example, the grounded theory approach was employed to conduct in-depth interviews and three-level coding of the data to systematically elucidate the influencing factors and implementation paths of resilience in living streets. The study reveals that the resilient development of living streets is influenced and constrained by six factors: positive values, demand factors, spatial environment, contextual factors, operation and management, and resilience characteristics. Each of these six main dimensions encompasses multiple subcategories and the factors influencing living streets’ resilience through different mechanisms. Building upon the guidance-demand-design-context-operation pathway model for enhancing the resilience of living streets in small and medium-sized towns in the Jiangnan region, the study proposes new perspectives such as correct orientation, adaptability to change, and a balance between rigidity and flexibility tailored explicitly to the enhancement of resilience in living streets. These novel perspectives contribute to the theoretical research achievements on the resilience development of living streets in small and medium-sized towns in the Jiangnan region of China to a certain extent. Furthermore, these findings hold significant implications for attaining SDG11, which emphasizes sustainable urban development.

The complications and sequelae of COVID-19 have jeopardized the well-being of residents, hindering community sustainability. Experiencing positive emotions can mitigate or counteract the negative effects of some diseases, but modern residential facades cannot effectively stimulate positive emotions among residents. Traditional culture influences people’s emotional responses. However, it is unclear what the result would be if traditional architectural patterns, one of the symbols of traditional culture, were redecorated as modern residential facades. Therefore, this paper used questionnaire research to collect data from residents of the Zhouxinyuan community in Wuxi on different types of traditional architectural patterns in assessing architectural aesthetics (N = 365) and health benefits (N = 154), using the Wilcoxon signed rank test to analyze the data for variance. The results indicate that modern residential facades decorated with traditional architectural patterns were more consistent with residents’ visual preferences and more likely to stimulate positive emotions than existing residential facades. Most importantly, modern residential facades decorated with traditional architectural patterns showed higher health benefits, especially in calming emotions (mean = 5, SD = 1.033). Based on these findings and the theory of positive experience, this paper constructs a conceptual framework for modern community public space renovation that contributes to improving the health benefits of modern communities. The framework can mitigate or counteract the complications or sequelae of the pandemic, contributing to the sustainable development of modern community public space environmental systems.