The rapid development of Chinese megacities in the last decades have been mainly characterized by top-down planning and large-scale urban development and redevelopment, as well as by using place-making as a tool for city branding. This approach has also been used in other countries and has been constantly criticized for replacing old neighborhoods. In recent years, alternative development modes and participative approaches in urban regeneration practices have emerged in cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. This paper investigates participative urban regeneration cases in Yangpu District, located in Shanghai, and the Dalang subdistrict in Shenzhen. Both case studies are located at the urban–rural interface, where past industrialization processes have resulted in complex sociospatial conditions. The primary focus was to analyze the governance aspects in the cases, such as the enabling factors that allow the participative approach to emerge in these projects and their governance model. This paper concludes on the importance of civil society organizations and the incorporation of social objectives in emerging participative regeneration practices.

In the urban development policy in China, city brands play an important role in setting targets for Chinese cities. These economic city brands, however, are not produced in an institutional vacuum: they are embedded in the visions national, provincial and municipal governments have for these cities, i.e., on multi-level governance. In this paper, a data-intense analysis of economic city branding practices has been conducted in the Greater Pearl River Delta, taking into account national, provincial and municipal documents in socio-economic, urban and land use planning. Evidence of economic and ecological initiatives through branding at the level of symbolic urban projects, such as new towns, has also been examined. It transpires that Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have adopted more sophisticated economic brand identities than the others and the reflection of brand-related targets from their actual projects is also more credible. While China’s national plans focus primarily on Hong Kong and Macau, provincial documents place more emphasis on the wealthier cities on the mainland (Shenzhen and Guangzhou). The other cities attract less attention and have more freedom to adopt economic city brands, but their efforts to live up to their promise are quite limited due to their weak financial position.

To understand and deal with real urban development problems, urban planners, designers, and managers need to combine and synthesize a variety of academic and professional knowledge. As our urban challenges grow more complex, learning how to do this effectively becomes ever more important. For educators, this means teaching students how to work in interdisciplinary settings, i.e. how to jointly discover the different disciplinary dimensions of an urban problem, and how to reflectively design courses of action. In this paper, we explore and evaluate the components of such interdisciplinary experiential learning, develop a framework to design and analyse this type of courses, and use it to position and evaluate a specific urban development management course. Results show that, by performing and reflecting upon specific professional roles, the course stimulates students to both integrate different disciplines and reflect on an array of academic and practical insights. Based on our evaluation, we discuss several didactical aspects that may help lecturers to improve their interdisciplinary teaching in urban planning, design, and management courses—particularly when creating learning experiences in an increasingly diverse professional, societal and educational setting.

Mega-event strategies and their impact on the development of host cities have drawn increasing interest as they have become part of wider city development strategies. Studies of mega-event strategies have tended to focus on a single perspective such as economic rationale and impact. As greater attention is paid to their long-term impact, there is a need for more comprehensive evaluation combining economic, social and environmental perspectives, and assessing the management of competing objectives. This paper proposes a comprehensive analytical framework for examining the multiple long-term impacts of mega-events on host cities. It illustrates the use of the framework through two examples of the Summer Olympics as the archetypal mega-event.

Mega-events have been explored by cities for urban reimaging and urban transformation processes. Due to their scale and catalytic effects, mega-events offer great opportunities for cities to showcase their local culture and create opportunities for their local economy, as well as the tourism and retail sectors, while also serving as catalysts for urban regeneration. The current COVID-19 pandemic has created a global crisis of unprecedented scale. Several extreme measures have been deployed to avoid contagion risk, including city lockdowns, subjecting residents to COVID-19 quarantine and social distancing, the closure of tourism attractions and the retail sector, as well as travel restrictions. This global crisis created a temporary shock to large-scale travel, the tourism sector and mass gathering, which resulted in the cancellation or postponement of nearly all mega-events in 2020. This paper identified the various challenges faced by event organisers during the COVID-19 pandemic and examined how relevant stakeholders addressed event risks and uncertainties. This paper suggests the incorporation of resilience in strategies for event legacy creation. Mega-events must incorporate adaptability and flexibility in their design, as well as event legacy planning and capacity building, to address the vulnerability and disturbances that future mega-events may encounter.

Most High-Speed Railway (HSR) station areas in China can be found at the urban periphery or in suburban areas, a phenomenon that has often been criticised. While debate about the influence these location choices have on the economic and sustainable development of cities rages on, little attention has been paid to the decision-making processes leading to these locations. This paper investigates these processes by comparing HSR stations in three cities: Shenzhen, Lanzhou and Jingmen. Our findings can help actors involved in making location choices develop awareness of different interests and create the conditions for successful development of HSR station areas.