Authors: Liu Zhi, Huang Zhiji, Yin Zihan, Zhang Lixin

The original English version of this paper was published in The China Quarterly:Zhi Liu, Zhiji Huang, Zihan Yin and Lixin Zhang. “Urban Regeneration under National Land Use Control: Guangdong's ‘Three-Old’ Redevelopment Programme”. The China Quarterly, Volume 258, June 2024, pp. 441–456.

Since 2009, Guangdong Province has launched pilot projects for the regeneration of old towns, old factories and old villages (shortened as the "Three-Old" Redevelopment Programme) across the whole province, a scheme that remains in operation to this day. Existing academic research on the "Three-Old" programme mainly focuses on city or project-level cases, while few systematic provincial-scale analyses have been conducted. To fill this research gap, this paper systematically examines the background, objectives, scope, policy framework, project typologies, regeneration models and preliminary outcomes of Guangdong’s "Three-Old" Redevelopment Programme. Notably, Guangdong’s initiative represents the largest-scale urban regeneration experiment in history. Compared with most global urban regeneration practices, it features a fundamentally different core objective: the programme was designed to resolve the intensifying tension between rising demand for urban construction land and stringent national land use controls, while leveraging land value appreciation to incentivise market actors to participate in redevelopment. As a new national territorial spatial planning system has been established, national land use regulation will be further tightened. Against this backdrop, Guangdong’s "Three-Old" experience has pioneered an innovative pathway for China’s urban spatial development.

KeywordsThree-Old Redevelopment; urban regeneration; national land use control; urban villages; Pearl River Delta; Guangdong Province

Guangdong has long stood at the forefront of China’s reform and opening-up and economic growth. Since China launched economic reforms in 1978, Guangdong has taken the lead in industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly across the Pearl River Delta (PRD), whose economic boom has drawn global attention for its scale and speed. Yet this explosive growth has brought hidden risks of inefficient land use and unregulated urban sprawl. Land utilisation in some regions has reached the ecological and spatial limits set by land use plans, creating a prominent bottleneck constraining further expansion. To unlock space for industrial and urban growth, the Guangdong Provincial Government launched a pilot demonstration scheme targeting old towns, old factories and old villages in 2009, aiming to explore new models for remedying inefficient land use — this initiative became known as the "Three-Old" Redevelopment Programme. Since most of these projects are located in highly urbanised zones, the programme falls under the umbrella of urban regeneration.

The "Three-Old" scheme operates across multiple administrative tiers, encompassing numerous policies and regulations issued by provincial, municipal and district governments, as well as diverse forms of urban renewal including conversion of industrial land to residential use, urban village regeneration and micro-renewal. It also covers various collaborative projects between governments, enterprises and communities, with over 10,000 completed and ongoing redevelopment schemes. By the end of the ten-year pilot phase in 2019, Guangdong had finished nearly 8,000 "Three-Old" projects covering a total area of 320 square kilometres. Drawing on this wealth of pilot experience, Guangdong continued to deepen its urban regeneration work, and the model gained recognition from the central government for nationwide replication. As of December 2022, the scope of Guangdong’s "Three-Old" redevelopment had expanded to 722 square kilometres, 457 square kilometres of which had been fully regenerated.

While academic research on the "Three-Old" programme has proliferated, comprehensive, holistic studies of the full pilot practice remain scarce. Early integrated analyses were limited by insufficient data and practical experience, leading to biased overall assessments of the scheme’s impacts. Most existing scholarship focuses on individual projects or single cities, lacking in-depth dissection of the full pilot initiative. Though prior scholars have produced valuable research, no comprehensive, holistic evaluation of the "Three-Old" pilot has yet been delivered — covering its driving forces, the roles of governments at all levels, and its far-reaching implications for China’s urban land policy reform and future spatial development.

This paper addresses this gap by offering a full account of the programme’s background, objectives, scope, policy framework, project typologies, implementation modalities and preliminary outcomes. It argues that the primary driver of the pilot is not the land value appreciation observed at the project level by some scholars, but institutional innovation by local governments seeking to resolve the acute practical tension between urban land demand and rigid national land use controls, with land value capture deployed as a mechanism to attract market participation. Prior to this scheme, China’s urban spatial expansion relied predominantly on outward greenfield sprawl. By launching the "Three-Old" policy at a strategic provincial level, Guangdong blazed a new trail, marking a new stage of China’s urban spatial development combining both outward expansion and inner-city regeneration. This shift carries profound implications for the prevailing land finance-driven urban development model and national land institutional reform.

Quantitative data for this research is primarily sourced from materials provided by the Guangdong Association for the Regeneration of Old Towns, Old Factories and Old Villages (hereafter the Three-Old Redevelopment Association), supplemented by publicly released data from the Guangdong Provincial Government. Between 2019 and 2021, we conducted extensive fieldwork including site visits with all stakeholder groups, case studies, questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews. Interviewees covered provincial, municipal and district government agencies, real estate developers, planning consultants, village committee representatives, villagers and local residents. An appendix contains the full interview and survey protocols used in this study. The research also reviews official provincial and municipal policy documents and analyses media coverage of relevant regulatory measures.

Part Two of the paper provides a detailed analysis of how rapid industrialisation and urbanisation reshaped land use in Guangdong, and how these shifts created the initial context for the launch of the Three-Old programme. Part Three focuses on institutional bottlenecks encountered during redevelopment and the innovative policy measures adopted to overcome these constraints. Part Four outlines the policy design, project delivery and preliminary outcomes of the ten-year pilot from 2009 to 2019. Part Five discusses the lessons and inspirations drawn from the programme for cities across China and globally.

Guangdong covers a land area of 180,000 square kilometres with a total population of 126 million, 74% of whom reside in urban areas. Its population density of 700 people per square kilometre far exceeds that of most sovereign nations (excluding city-states). As China’s economic powerhouse, Guangdong recorded a per capita GDP of RMB 98,700 (approximately USD 15,400) in 2021. The total built-up urban area across its 21 prefecture-level cities reaches 6,400 square kilometres. Notably, the average urban population density stands at 14,600 people per square kilometre, markedly higher than international averages. The Pearl River Delta is Guangdong’s most economically developed and highly urbanised region, comprising nine major cities including the megacities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Together with Hong Kong and Macao, the PRD forms the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a core national strategic region on par with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Yangtze River Delta urban agglomerations.

Over the past four decades, Guangdong, especially the PRD, has attracted massive investment, rapid industrial growth and concentrated population inflows, triggering swift expansion of urban construction land. In the early 1980s, Guangdong’s industrialisation followed a dual-track model: township enterprises developed on collective village land, while industrial parks were built within urban jurisdictions. Leveraging reform and opening-up policies and globalisation, rural areas across the PRD accelerated land development to attract manufacturing industries. Yet without a comprehensive spatial planning system, industrial land in towns and villages developed haphazardly, characterised by low efficiency and severe environmental pollution. Meanwhile, local governments overbuilt urban industrial parks to attract manufacturing firms, leading to oversupply and idle industrial land in many cities. This extensive industrial land model, paired with rising labour and land rental costs, forced numerous low-value-added manufacturing plants to relocate to inland China and other developing economies.

Simultaneously, urban villages emerged as a prominent challenge within city boundaries. Urban villages are rural residential enclaves gradually enclosed by new urban development. Due to high demolition compensation and resettlement costs, local governments often avoided large-scale demolition within these settlements. By contrast, expropriation of farmland carries compensation rates calculated based on agricultural output value, making it a cheaper source of construction land. This created a strong government preference for converting farmland to meet urban development demands. Villagers who lost agricultural land during urbanisation constructed multi-storey buildings on their homesteads to generate rental income, leading to the proliferation of urban villages across Guangdong, particularly Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Low rental prices in urban villages provided affordable housing for migrant workers and low-income groups, yet these settlements suffer from inadequate public services and pervasive safety hazards.

Sustained urban expansion pushed construction land utilisation across Guangdong to approach or hit the upper limits of permitted land use intensity. By the end of 2000, land scarcity had severely hindered industrial and urban growth, especially in the PRD, where excessive land utilisation created a critical developmental bottleneck. Data in Table 1 shows that in 2008, seven of the nine PRD cities recorded built-up land utilisation rates exceeding 20%, with the remaining land allocated to farmland, protected areas and non-developable terrain.

China enforces strict cultivated land protection policies, so Guangdong’s urban spatial sprawl is constrained by national land use controls and development quotas. Each year, the Ministry of Natural Resources (formerly the Ministry of Land and Resources) sets a national total quota for new urban construction land via territorial spatial planning, breaking this quota down hierarchically to provincial, municipal and county governments to fulfil farmland preservation obligations. The core mandate of the Ministry of Natural Resources is to safeguard cultivated land by imposing rigid caps on total urban and rural construction land nationwide. Annual urban land quotas allocated to cities are often insufficient to meet local expansion demands. The Ministry deploys remote sensing technology and on-site law enforcement inspections to penalise unauthorised land development, rendering construction land quotas a hard binding constraint on local growth. Beyond this numerical cap, local governments face heavy financial burdens from farmland protection rules: when converting cultivated land to urban construction land, authorities must offset the loss with an equal quantity and quality of newly reclaimed farmland (the "cultivated land balance" requirement). As readily cultivable land is increasingly converted to urban use, the unit cost of supplementary farmland rises year on year, gradually pushing local governments to prioritise urban regeneration and existing land redevelopment. An alternative mechanism for land supply is the "increase-decrease linkage" policy, which allows rural construction land to be reclaimed as farmland, releasing equivalent quotas for urban development. However, high reclamation costs, substantial compensation payments to village collectives and limited stocks of reclaimable rural land create major implementation barriers for this policy.

In just three decades after reform and opening-up, the PRD leveraged its proximity to Hong Kong and global markets to emerge as a global manufacturing hub. Concurrent growth in services, finance, information technology and innovative industries drew massive labour inflows, generating intense land demand, particularly for residential space amid a growing population. Yet while service and high-tech industries require less land than manufacturing, many locales face surplus industrial land, creating a structural mismatch in land supply. Restructuring existing urban land use therefore became an urgent priority.

By 2009, Guangdong recognised that land utilisation intensity had neared development ceilings, and urban and industrial expansion were increasingly constrained by national land use controls. The provincial government resolved to pursue an alternative growth path via existing land redevelopment and urban regeneration, formally launching the Three-Old Redevelopment Programme. The core policy objective was to generate additional space for sustained urban growth and population expansion by restructuring land use and boosting land use efficiency. In this sense, Guangdong’s urban regeneration represents an institutional innovation adopted by local governments to overcome spatial planning and regulatory constraints amid globalisation-driven economic expansion.

Prior to the launch of the Three-Old scheme, urban expansion constituted the dominant development model, underpinned by China’s land regime, public fiscal framework and urban planning system. China operates a dual land ownership system: urban land is state-owned, while rural land belongs to village collectives. Before the 2019 revision of the Land Administration Law, only the state held authority to convert rural collective land to state-owned urban land. All commercial and residential development land must be allocated via public bidding, auction and listing, with usage rights awarded to the highest bidder. Additionally, fiscal regulations permit local governments to retain land transfer revenues as a core source of local public finance, funding infrastructure and municipal services. When cities require additional land for commercial and residential construction, governments acquire rural land via expropriation within allocated quotas, install infrastructure, and release consolidated land parcels through public tender. This model generates substantial land transfer income to fund municipal construction. Ministry of Finance statistics show that between 2002 and 2020, land transfer revenues accounted for 50% or more of annual local public fiscal receipts (combining tax and non-tax revenue). Local fiscal reliance on land proceeds deepened over time, yet tighter central controls over urban land supply created mounting pressure on this growth model.

Four interlocking barriers complicate the revitalisation of built-up land stocks:First, fiscal constraints. Redevelopment costs for existing built-up land are often far higher than farmland expropriation costs. Under prevailing land management rules, local governments lack sufficient fiscal reserves to fund large-scale urban regeneration. Prior to redevelopment, authorities must acquire land reserves and cover demolition and resettlement compensation, imposing heavy capital burdens on most municipal governments.

Second, fragmented institutional governance. Prior to the 2018 institutional restructuring, land supply was administered by bureaus of land and resources, while land use planning fell under urban planning bureaus. Conflicting institutional mandates created obstacles to stakeholder coordination during regeneration. Land and resources bureaus prioritised curbing urban sprawl and protecting farmland, while urban planning bureaus focused on facilitating development to accommodate economic and population growth. Since the Three-Old programme was driven by land quota shortages, land bureaus held stronger incentives to advance redevelopment, yet detailed implementation rules and planning schemes required input from urban planning bureaus, which lacked frameworks to integrate large-scale regeneration into standard urban planning workflows.

Third, structural limitations of China’s urban planning system. The national planning regime was originally designed for greenfield urban expansion rather than stock land regeneration. As urban regeneration evolved into a core national strategy and thousands of redevelopment projects were rolled out across the country, profound shifts to urban land use structure became inevitable, requiring comprehensive reforms to planning systems to accommodate regeneration. Such systemic overhauls have not yet been fully implemented.

Fourth, incomplete land and real estate titling systems, especially in rural areas. Many built structures lack clear legal property rights, creating major hurdles for redevelopment. The Regulations for the Implementation of the Land Administration Law require unambiguous title registration for land transactions and redevelopment. The PRD contains large volumes of unauthorised construction with unresolved legal status, rendering regeneration procedures lengthy, costly and administratively cumbersome. Streamlined, formalised mechanisms for handling incomplete, semi-legal "small property housing" are urgently required as stock land redevelopment accelerates.

Given these overlapping constraints, municipalities had limited capacity to navigate existing regulatory frameworks unaided. Recognising mounting land shortages and the criticality of unlocking land supply for economic growth, the provincial government coordinated cross-jurisdictional policy alignment to help cities overcome bottlenecks, unify development objectives and secure central government pilot approval for the Three-Old scheme. The central government endorsed the pilot as a mechanism to balance competing national priorities of urbanisation, cultivated land protection and ecological conservation.

Building on pioneering informal regeneration practices in Foshan City, the Guangdong Provincial Government formalised the Three-Old pilot scheme via Document No.78 issued in 2009. The core pilot objective was to realise intensive, economical land use by restructuring urban, industrial and village land, unlocking new spatial capacity for urban growth. Document No.78 established five foundational guiding principles for municipal implementation:

A defining innovation of the pilot was the intentional integration of market actors into delivery. Given that regeneration costs and administrative burdens frequently exceed local fiscal capacity, policy incentives were deployed to attract real estate developers and other market participants to participate. This not only converts inefficient, extensive land use into high-value intensive development, but also enables shared distribution of land value appreciation between public and private stakeholders.

Negotiated land conveyance emerged as a pivotal institutional innovation. The framework permits original land right holders, investors and implementation bodies to negotiate directly over land transfer terms, eliminating the traditional model of government-led land banking prior to conveyance and drastically reducing public capital pressure. Under the Three-Old rules, market actors may share land value gains with original right holders provided projects comply with official planning requirements. This market-oriented mechanism stimulates private investment and automatically screens out projects where projected costs exceed anticipated land value appreciation.

For fiscally robust municipalities, redevelopment can follow the conventional model of demolition compensation, resident resettlement, infrastructure investment and public tender for land release. In the standard greenfield development pipeline, governments conduct pre-development expropriation, demolition and resettlement, install infrastructure, transfer consolidated "clean land" to land reserve agencies, and release parcels uniformly via public tender. Yet in Guangdong, where massive volumes of stock land await regeneration, most municipalities face severe capital and resource shortages, making market-led delivery a pragmatic, innovative alternative. Under this new model, governments bear no upfront redevelopment costs or land acquisition obligations. For high-value appreciation projects, authorities can deliver required public amenities at zero fiscal expenditure.

The Three-Old programme encompasses diverse regeneration typologies (Table 2). Land use conversion is subject to strict oversight via municipal master plans and land use regulations. Where land use reclassification generates value appreciation, existing land right holders or village collectives must pay supplementary land price fees corresponding to the value gap between the original and new land use categories. In old village regeneration, rural construction land tenure may remain unchanged. Excluding micro-renewal schemes, urban village redevelopment typically involves conversion of rural collective land to state-owned urban land. Industrial land often undergoes reclassification to commercial or residential use, generating varying degrees of land value uplift, which shapes divergent levels of market interest from real estate developers and private investors.

Shenzhen developed a viable commercial regeneration model built on collaboration between real estate developers and village collectives. Post-regeneration land is split into three designated zones: resettlement housing for villagers, whose residents capture gains from asset appreciation; marketable commodity residential housing, whose sales revenues cover full project costs; and mandatory public facilities required by municipal planning codes. In favourable housing market conditions, proceeds from commodity housing sales fully offset total redevelopment expenditures.

Market actors exhibit strong enthusiasm for industrial land conversion to commercial or residential use ("industry-to-commerce" and "industry-to-residence" schemes), driven by substantial land value appreciation potential, lower acquisition and compensation costs, and streamlined land conversion procedures. Developers also target suburban low-value industrial zones in major cities such as Guangzhou for transformation into high-value cultural and creative industrial spaces. While the Three-Old framework prioritises market participation, municipal governments directly deliver certain public-interest projects including blighted historic districts, heavily polluted zones and heritage conservation areas. Though these schemes deliver significant social benefits, they generate minimal land value appreciation, requiring governments to fund, plan and manage infrastructure upgrades, public amenities and community facilities.

Planning approval is a mandatory prerequisite for all regeneration projects; development permits and construction licenses are only issued once schemes comply with formal planning requirements. Planning serves two primary functions: mitigating adverse spillover impacts of regeneration on surrounding land use, and reserving sufficient space for future industrial development and economic expansion. Since standard urban planning workflows lack dedicated procedures for stock land regeneration, Guangdong mandated municipal planning bureaus to compile standalone urban regeneration master plans and annual implementation schedules. These documents define project boundaries, development objectives, functional zoning, timelines and delivery modalities, establishing clear benchmarks for municipal planning review and licensing.

A critical complementary process within the pilot was the formal legalisation of unauthorised construction. Most such structures were built without official planning or construction permits. Document No.78 issued by the provincial government allows property owners to pay supplementary fees corresponding to regulatory standards in force at the time of construction to formalise their titles.

Multi-tier governments, private enterprises, village communities and individual residents constitute core stakeholders throughout implementation, with coordinated cross-sector collaboration underpinning pilot success. The provincial government performs overarching policy coordination, monitoring and oversight, while delegating discretionary authority to municipal and district governments to tailor implementation procedures to local conditions. Municipal and district authorities issue detailed implementation rules, identify eligible projects and planning boundaries, incentivise market participation and provide ongoing project guidance and administrative support.

Cities across Guangdong established dedicated Urban Renewal Bureaus to oversee delivery. Real estate developers, original title holders and community residents actively participate in project operation. However, complex village collective governance structures and fragmented property rights create persistent challenges for equitable distribution of redevelopment-derived economic gains. Negotiations typically begin between developers and village committee leadership, followed by community-wide consultation with villagers. The opaque nature of this process creates opportunities for rent-seeking and corrupt practice. Many villagers perceive unfair benefit distribution and resist project delivery, leading to pervasive schedule delays. While judicial resolution of disputes is formally available, courts face overwhelming case backlogs and limited specialised land expertise, reducing willingness to intervene. To mitigate conflict, developers offer substantial compensation packages to original residents in high-margin projects, yet this practice inflates public compensation expectations and drives up costs for all future regeneration schemes.

To deepen coordinated collaboration between government agencies, market actors and local communities, the Guangdong Provincial Government established a semi-official industry body, the Guangdong Three-Old Redevelopment Association, in 2018. By the end of 2021, the Association boasted over 500 corporate and institutional members actively engaged in urban regeneration. Over its years of operation, the Association has played a pivotal role in advancing regeneration practice by collecting stakeholder feedback, identifying implementation bottlenecks, drafting remedial policy proposals and reporting policy outcomes to the provincial government. It also organises conferences, training workshops and knowledge-sharing events to disseminate policy interpretations, project delivery experience and best practice case studies. Major cities have established local branches of the Three-Old Association to facilitate multi-stakeholder dialogue within municipal jurisdictions.

The ten-year pilot delivered substantial tangible results across Guangdong. By 2019, 7,894 Three-Old projects had been completed, covering a total area of 320 square kilometres (Table 3), accounting for nearly 10% of all new urban land supply province-wide. Over half of finished projects are concentrated in the PRD, where all regeneration typologies represent more than 65% of total redeveloped land area. While outcomes in non-PRD regions are less pronounced, the programme delivered impressive provincial-wide results overall.

The initiative attracted RMB 1.7 trillion in total capital investment, 86% of which originated from private market sources, demonstrating the central role of private capital in delivery. The scheme advanced intensive industrial land use: 1,329 projects covering 44 square kilometres converted secondary industrial land to tertiary service use; 1,842 projects spanning 50 square kilometres delivered industrial upgrading of existing manufacturing zones; and 374 projects covering 47 square kilometres upgraded tertiary service land. The programme also stabilised residential land supply, with redeveloped stock land accounting for approximately 30% of all residential land released between 2012 and 2018. As of September 2021, the Three-Old scheme delivered 51,400 affordable housing units.

The programme generated wide-ranging social benefits including pollution remediation, urban environmental upgrading, public amenity provision and heritage district conservation. By 2018, 906 urban infrastructure and service upgrade projects covering 28.7 square kilometres, 385 low-income community improvement schemes spanning 12.7 square kilometres, and 1,499 full village regeneration projects had been completed. By 2020, 7.82 million square metres of culturally distinctive historic built fabric had been restored and preserved via the programme.

Drawing on municipal implementation experience, the provincial government issued formal guiding documents to further refine urban regeneration frameworks. The central government closely monitored Guangdong’s pilot, and in 2016 the former Ministry of Land and Resources issued Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Redevelopment of Inefficient Urban Construction Land (Document No.147), establishing national overarching guidance for stock land regeneration.

Nevertheless, the ten-year pilot exposed structural flaws and limitations. While land use efficiency improved, certain population groups experienced social marginalisation and displacement as a byproduct of redevelopment. Migrant tenant populations, excluded from formal project negotiation channels, consistently bear disproportionate negative impacts. Though developers and indigenous villagers capture financial gains from regeneration, tenants face forced relocation to peripheral suburbs, extended commuting times, disrupted employment and longer school travel distances for children, alongside rising rental costs in remaining unregenerated urban villages. Public dissatisfaction persists over inequitable compensation and opaque corrupt practices, exemplified by the high-profile Xian Village redevelopment dispute in Guangzhou. Scholars warn that the market-led model creates long-term risks of land price inflation, gentrification and spatial inequality. Urban villages constitute the primary affordable housing stock for migrant workers across the PRD, and chronic undersupply of formal affordable housing means Three-Old projects risk imposing unaccounted-for heavy social costs.

China’s urban regeneration movement originated in the 1980s, with Shanghai pioneering inner-city block renewal. Early schemes were concentrated in a small number of large metropolises, focused on modernising central districts, upgrading residential living conditions, restructuring land use and converting industrial zones to high-rise residential blocks. Yet constrained by legal frameworks, land use policies, and planning and fiscal systems optimised for greenfield sprawl, large-scale regeneration failed to spread nationwide. Guangdong’s pilot blazed an alternative institutional and policy pathway for stock land regeneration. Drawing on Guangdong’s experience, the central government designated urban regeneration as a core priority within the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035.

Guangdong’s Three-Old programme delivers replicable lessons for other Chinese provinces:First, it validates urban regeneration as a viable alternative to greenfield sprawl, unlocking new developmental space for municipal growth.Second, it demonstrates that leveraging private market participation alleviates fiscal pressure and reduces the upfront capital burden of large-scale redevelopment.Third, for land-scarce provinces, the pilot provides a blueprint for systematic planning and targeted project support to secure sustained urban growth capacity.

Despite its notable achievements, the pilot faces universal challenges including public resistance to redevelopment, gentrification and rising implementation costs. Moving forward, Guangdong will build on ten years of pilot experience to deepen urban regeneration policy refinement, addressing practical challenges via regulatory upgrades including structured benefit-sharing mechanisms, mitigating public opposition, and deploying land value capture revenues to expand public service provision.

Guangdong’s future regeneration agenda will encounter mounting operational hurdles. Most low-complexity, high land-value appreciation projects have already been completed, leaving remaining schemes with higher delivery barriers. A second critical challenge is upholding social equity throughout regeneration. While indigenous title holders’ rights are protected, migrant workers and their families residing in urban villages remain marginalised. Regeneration frameworks are not designed to deliver targeted public services for migrant populations, who rarely secure fair compensation during demolition and resettlement. Governments also fear that expanding compensation entitlements for migrant groups will drive up overall project costs, making equitable protection of migrant communities a central unresolved challenge for Guangdong’s future urban regeneration practice.

From a global comparative perspective, Guangdong’s ten-year pilot represents an unprecedented large-scale urban regeneration experiment, distinguished by four unique characteristics:First, unlike Western European and North American regeneration schemes driven by inner-city decline, Guangdong’s programme was triggered by acute municipal demand for physical development space amid globalisation-fuelled economic expansion and population growth. This highlights the profound spatial transformations wrought by globalisation, a dynamic observable not only in Western nations but also across China and other developing economies.

Second, the Guangdong model is internationally distinctive, driven not merely by global urbanisation trends but by domestic land scarcity and rigid national land use controls. Even absent globalisation, domestic investment and consumption-driven economic and population growth would inevitably create pressure for stock land regeneration under binding national land quotas.

Third, unlike most Western city-scale piecemeal regeneration projects, Guangdong’s scheme operates province-wide, covering a land area equivalent to an average Western European nation and serving a population exceeding 126 million. Delivery requires coordinated collaboration and robust stakeholder governance mechanisms spanning provincial, municipal and district governments, private market actors and affected communities. While China’s institutional framework for urban development and regeneration is unique, Guangdong’s experience offers actionable lessons for other developing economies facing rising economic output and tightening land constraints.

Fourth, the pilot demonstrates exceptional strategic planning and cross-jurisdictional coordination, a valuable benchmark for international practice. Many overseas regeneration initiatives consist of fragmented local reconstruction projects lacking overarching strategic alignment, whereas the Guangdong model balances long-term strategic vision with pragmatic on-the-ground delivery. This structure is intrinsically linked to China’s national land governance system and central oversight of local land use. The central government encourages local institutional innovation to resolve land supply shortages, while provincial authorities provide strategic guidance and policy support to municipalities, enabling cities to overcome resource constraints and drive growth via stock land regeneration — a natural evolutionary institutional pathway. In this sense, Guangdong’s Three-Old Redevelopment Programme serves as a model of urban adaptation to external shifts while balancing domestic local economic, social and ecological development imperatives.

The authors thank Lin Chusheng of the University of Hong Kong and Sun Li of the University of Leeds for their constructive comments on the initial manuscript; the Guangdong Three-Old Redevelopment Association for supporting data collection; the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.72274229); and the Strategic Research Project on Guangdong Urban Regeneration (2022-GD-13) commissioned by the School of Government, Central University of Finance and Economics and the Guangdong Institute of Engineering Science and Technology Development Strategy for financial support of this research.

Liu Zhi, Director, Peking University–Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land PolicyHuang Zhiji, Associate Professor, School of Government, Central University of Finance and EconomicsYin Zihan, Lecturer, School of Public Administration, Zhejiang University of Finance and EconomicsZhang Lixin, Lecturer, College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University