SPATIAL STRATEGIES AND IMPLEMENTATION PATHWAYS FOR THE ALL-AGE FRIENDLY RENEWAL OF OLD COMMUNITIES IN ZHUHAI UNDER THE ORIENTATION OF MODERN MARINE CITIES

Abstract

Coastal cities have shifted from outward expansion to reworking the housing stock they already hold, and renewing aging communities has become harder to manage as a result. Three pressures overlap in these neighborhoods: a resident profile that no longer matches the original design brief, almost no slack in the public space budget, and marine-climate risks that accumulate rather than arrive one at a time. Strategy proposals are abundant in the literature; empirical grounding for them is thinner. This study therefore works through two Zhuhai cases, Huafa Community and Jiangjunshan Community, and deliberately avoids generating fresh questionnaire data. The evidence used is material a reader can check: Huafa’s community health inspection records, the 3,000-plus items of resident feedback reported in the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development case collection, the Jiangjunshan contiguous redevelopment documents, and the “Community Service Center” program. Policy analysis, literature review, evidence coding, activity-chain analysis and case comparison are combined into a six-step chain of reasoning: factual evidence, problem type, affected activity chain, spatial mechanism, strategic response, evaluation indicator. The same chain translates “modern maritime city” into five community qualities that can be observed on site: spatial openness, blue-green permeability, slow-mobility continuity, functional complexity and climate adaptability. Six strategies follow from it. These are networked restructuring of public space, integration of an all-age slow-mobility system, embedding of composite service units, continuous accessibility across the whole journey, blue-green micro-system integration, and intergenerational sharing supported by operational governance. They are then arranged as a loop running from identification through classification, renewal and operation to evaluation. The argument, in short, is that traceable evidence should decide which problems get addressed and which strategies get chosen. Renewal on that basis is no longer a checklist of works but governance of living space organized around how residents actually move through their day.