Public attitudes toward state-led urban village rehabilitation in Shenzhen, China

Abstract

State-led urban village rehabilitation has emerged as an important approach in urban development, addressing the dilemma of inadequate housing supply and poor-quality aging buildings. Nowadays, it has evolved into a widely discussed public issue with far-reaching societal impacts. However, few research explores public attitudes toward such state-led urban rehabilitation initiatives using large-scale data sets. This study investigates how the state-led urban village rehabilitation project in Shenzhen, China, was discussed on Weibo, a Chinese platform similar to Twitter. By applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modelling analysis and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique for sentiment analysis, the study analyses a substantial dataset comprising 790 Weibo posts and 2096 comments. This methodological approach has captured four main topics of public focus, including increasing rent and large-scale displacement, spatial transformation, inhabitants' interest, and capital and power relationships. The findings reveal spatial transformation and improvement of living conditions are significantly linked with positive attitudes toward urban village rehabilitation projects. Conversely, negative sentiments emerge from fears over the increased rent and the risk of displacement, the anger over the loss of residents' interests, and the critiques of profit-driven motives underpinning the capital and power nexus. This study further provides a valuable reference for evaluating and refining urban rehabilitation strategies regarding the protection of the inhabitants' interests and the promotion of social sustainability based on the most concerned factors of the public.