The renovation of cities’ urban industrial heritage fabric is becoming increasingly recognized as an opportunity for post-industrial urban development, suggesting a complex interplay between the renovation of industrial heritage sites and urban regeneration effects in surrounding areas. However, prior research on industrial heritage renovation rarely transcends the arts-led gentrification narrative, and whether/to what extent industrial heritage renovation can catalyze sustainable urban regeneration in surrounding areas—and the driving forces underpinning that process—remains unclear, especially within the Chinese context. In this research, we focus on Shanghai’s top-down policy of renovating industrial heritage sites into locations for creative industry clusters. By comparing Yishan Road and Changyuan Districts from 2008 to 2018, we arrived at a nuanced understanding of the urban regeneration effects of industrial heritage renovation as a policy-induced gentrification model. We further concluded that the renovation of a city’s industrial heritage fabric could catalyze sustainable urban regeneration if implemented through an integrated development model that considered the physical, economic, social, and cultural aspects that resonated with the current policy and institutional system. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications in urban policy and planning discussions on the strategic value of industrial heritage renovation in post-industrial cities.

Since reform and opening up began in 1978, China has developed and urbanized rapidly, and a dual urban–rural economy has evolved in its megacity regions. Unlike the United States and other countries with neoliberal regimes that rely on the market to adjust economic relations and where there is little explicit national-level planning, China is a regionally decentralized developmental state where government plays a major role in development. Coordinated urban–rural development has been national policy since 2003, and China began to experiment with what is termed integrated urban–rural development in 2006. This article describes coordinated urban–rural development in China’s 2 developing megacity regions with the most advanced coordination programs (Chengdu and Chongqing) and 2 highly urbanized megacity regions with well-developed strategies to integrate city and countryside (Shanghai and Suzhou). It describes 4 models of the coordination process: the municipal government–led top-down model (post-1990 Shanghai), empowering the entrepreneurial township government model (post-2008 Suzhou), the negotiation model (post-2003 Chengdu), and the labor transfer model (post-2003 Chongqing). It discusses the forms that integration of city and countryside have taken in the most advanced Chinese megacity regions and their implications for other cities in China and other developing countries with different characteristics and at different development stages.