As urbanization has accelerated, rail transit has evolved from being a mere means of transportation to a public area that houses the city’s cultural memory and serves as a crucial portal for the public to understand the culture of the city. As an urban public space with huge passenger flow, the metro (or subway) cultural space has also become a public cultural space, serving communal welfare and representing the image of the city. It is currently attracting more and more attention from the academic community. Wuhan, located in central China, has many subway lines and its engineering construction has set several national firsts, which is a typical sample of urban subway development in China. In this study, we use Python 3.13.0 crawler technology to capture the public’s comments on cultural space of Wuhan metro in social media and adopt SnowNLP sentiment score and LDA thematic clustering analysis to explore the overall quality, distinct characteristics, and deficiencies of Wuhan metro cultural space construction, and propose targeted design optimization strategies based on this study. The main findings are as follows: (1) The metro cultural space is an important window for the public to perceive the city culture, and the public in general shows positive perception of emotions: among the 16,316 data samples, 47.7% are positive comments, 17.8% are neutral comments, and 34.5% are negative comments. (2) Based on the frequency of content in the sample data for metro station exit and entrance space, metro train space, metro concourse and platform space, they are ranked as weak cultural spaces (18%), medium cultural spaces (33%), and strong cultural spaces (49%) in terms of the public’s perception of urban culture. (3) At present, there are certain deficiencies in Wuhan metro cultural space: the circulation paths in concourses and platforms are overly dominant, leaving little space for rest or interaction; the cultural symbols of metro train space are fragmented; the way of articulation between cultural and functional space in the metro station exit and entrance space is weak, and the space is single in form. (4) Wuhan metro cultural space needs to be based on locality landscape expression, functional zoning reorganization, innovative scene creation to optimize the visual symbol system and behavioral symbol system in the space, to establish a good image of the space, and to strengthen the public’s cultural identity and emotional resonance.

Industrial heritage—particularly large modern cement plants—serves as a crucial witness to the architectural and technological evolution of modern urbanization. In Europe, North America, and East Asia, many decommissioned cement factories have been transformed into cultural venues, creative districts, or urban landmarks, while a greater number of sites still face the risks of functional decline and spatial disappearance. In China, early large-scale cement plants have received limited attention in international industrial heritage research, and their conservation and adaptive reuse practices remain underdeveloped. This study takes the Huaxin Cement Plant, founded in 1907, as the research object. As the birthplace of China’s modern cement industry, it preserves the world’s only complete wet-process rotary kiln production line, representing exceptional rarity and typological significance. Combining social media perception analysis with the Hidalgo-Giralt four-quadrant model, the study aims to clarify the plant’s value positioning and propose a design-oriented pathway for spatial activation. Based on 378 short videos and 75,001 words of textual data collected from five major platforms, the study conducts a value-tag analysis of public perceptions across five dimensions—historical, technological, social, aesthetic, and economic. Two composite indicators, Cultural Representativeness (CR) and Utilization Intensity (UI), are further established to evaluate the relationship between heritage value and spatial performance. The findings indicate that (1) historical and aesthetic values dominate public perception, whereas social and economic values are significantly underrepresented; (2) the Huaxin Cement Plant falls within the “high cultural representativeness/low utilization intensity” quadrant, revealing concentrated heritage value but insufficient spatial activation; (3) the gap between value cognition and spatial transformation primarily arises from limited public accessibility, weak interpretive narratives, and a lack of immersive experience. In response, the study proposes five optimization strategies: expanding public access, building a multi-layered interpretive system, introducing immersive and interactive design, integrating into the Yangtze River Industrial Heritage Corridor, and encouraging community co-participation. As a representative case of modern Chinese industrial heritage distinguished by its integrity and scarcity, the Huaxin Cement Plant not only enriches the understanding of industrial heritage typology in China but also provides a methodological paradigm for the “value positioning–spatial utilization–heritage activation” framework, bearing both international comparability and disciplinary methodological significance.

An exhibition is a complex organic system. The spatial design of an exhibition aims to visualize the ideology of this complex system in space, a process known as visual spatialization. How to integrate landmark buildings in a city into the visual design of large exhibition spaces is an academic and practical issue worth exploring. This study examined the exhibition space design of the Wuhan Design Biennale as a typical case. We conducted a limited survey on Wuhan’s image using the theory of urban image cognition, employing methods such as drawing cognitive maps, interviews, and network search image analysis to extract elements that could represent the image of Wuhan city and reflect Wuhan design in the minds of the public. The study found that: (1) whether it is an image map or a questionnaire, the mention rate of many bridges in Wuhan was very high, becoming an important element of the image of the river city today; (2) in the survey on internet images, the key elements of the “river city image” were more prominent; and (3) the urban image survey helped designers understand the characteristics of the public’s cognition of urban space more comprehensively and meticulously, thereby providing a focus for creative design. This innovative design method has been applied to the exhibition space design of the Wuhan Design Biennale, garnering significant praise for its implementation. This study summarizes the mechanism of integrating landmark buildings in cities into the visual design of large exhibition spaces, hoping to provide a reference for the design of future large exhibition spaces.

Entering the digital media era, the way of regional culture dissemination has changed significantly. Short video platforms represented by Tiktok, Kuaishou and WeChat video account have constructed a new way of regional culture dissemination, and also carry the inheritance function of regional culture. Based on the SOR theoretical model, the article takes the users of mobile short video platform as the research object, and applies structural equation modelling to test the path and influence of emotional value and educational function on users' cultural identity. The results show that: first, emotional value and educational function have an important chain mediation effect between viewing experience and cultural identity. Secondly, the transmission of material culture in short videos has a direct effect on cultural identity; thirdly, the educational function embedded in non-material culture in short videos has an indirect effect on cultural identity.

In the context of today's information explosion, people are facing huge challenges in information acquisition and processing. With the popularization of the Internet and the continuous growth of digitized information, big data search and mining technology is becoming an important tool to cope with the huge amount of information. In this paper, for example, to explore the content and impact of short videos on Wuhan's city image, Python crawler is used to crawl the relevant topics posted on the Tik Tok short video platform with the keyword of "Wuhan", and to remove repetitive and non-obvious data to realize the initial data collection. The data on audiovisual information, tendency and presentation mode of the video samples were obtained, and the content analysis method was used to analyze the content of ShakeEn short videos related to Wuhan's city image. Obtain detailed data on the number of likes, comments, and video plays of the video samples, and utilize data mining to explore the impact of ShakeEn short videos on Wuhan's city image shaping. This study is of positive significance in solving the information overload and decision-making inefficiency in analyzing the accurate shaping and effective dissemination of city image, and provides theoretical and practical support for information dissemination and public opinion monitoring.