Case library · Unofficial English translation · Glossary

How Chinese cities are reusing
inefficient land

Twenty-nine case studies from the 2026 national collection on revitalizing existing and inefficiently used land — from aerospace parks on old textile sites to a soy sauce brewery that bought out its neighbours. Each case is translated in full, with its location, key figures and the land and planning tools it used.

Cases
29
Provinces
19
Themes
6
Land covered
29 km²

Geographic spread

Where the cases are located

Province-level administrative boundaries come from the site's local China boundary dataset; points show the case cities.

Points mark the city of each case, not the exact site. The boundary geometry is loaded locally; no third-party basemap tiles are used.

Clear

Mining & Brownfield

3 cases

Gongshu District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang · 547 mu · 36.5 ha

Transformation of the Hangzhou Iron & Steel Banshan Base, Hangzhou

杭州市杭钢半山基地转型发展

After its steel lines closed in 2016, Hangzhou Iron & Steel Group redeveloped 547 mu of its retained land into a computing and data-centre cluster. Fragmented allocated and leased parcels were re-plotted and transferred back to the group by agreement under new planning conditions, ending what the case calls an "institutional freeze" on the land.

Floor area ratio, IT innovation centre 0.7 → 1.5

Caofeidian New City, Tangshan, Hebei · 168 mu · 11.2 ha

Qinglong Lake Data Ecosystem Centre, Caofeidian, Tangshan

唐山市青龙湖数据生态中心改造升级

Land next to an oilfield production area, hemmed in by well sites and pipelines and left undeveloped, was taken back into the government reserve and rezoned as new-type industrial land combining research and manufacturing. Multi-storey factories cut the building footprint by about 77% compared with conventional single-storey layouts; more than 40 firms have moved in.

Factory footprint vs. conventional layout 73,736 → 16,936 m²

Bagongshan District, Huainan, Anhui · 346 mu · 23.1 ha

Repurposing the Bijiagang Coal Mine Site as a Green Food Industrial Park, Huainan

淮南市毕家岗矿区业态重塑

A coal mine closed in 2003 and ecologically restored in 2016 still sat idle because of overlapping tenure and an outdated mining land use. The district government recovered the land from the mining group, rezoned it, bundled factory land with utilities in a single supply package, and offers standard factories on a "lease first, transfer later" basis.

Floor area ratio 0.3 → above 1.5

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