Abstract
Urban redevelopment has been widely implemented to address social, economic and environmental challenges. However, the geography of urban redevelopment, its underlying mechanisms and driving forces remain insufficiently understood, both theoretically and across different metropolitan scales. Here, to fill this gap, we analyze state-owned land transactions between 2012 and 2022 across 326 Chinese cities. We find that China’s city hierarchy exerts a regulatory effect on urban redevelopment. Higher-ranked cities tend to prioritize government regulation over market forces, whereas lower-ranked cities rely more on market-oriented approaches, and this divergence explains varying redevelopment patterns across city hierarchies. Our findings also reflect a shift toward top–down urban governance aligned with central-government policy, with higher-tier cities leading in implementing diverse redevelopment practices to achieve economic and non-economic goals. This study advances our understanding of administrative power in urban governance and offers insights for developing tailored strategies across different city hierarchies.
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Data availability
All data used in this study are publicly available from several sources. Administrative boundaries for cities and their internal spatial units were obtained from the National Platform for Common Geospatial Information Services (https://www.tianditu.gov.cn/). The land transaction database was acquired using Python scripts from the China Land Market website (http://www.landchina.com). Additional independent variable data were sourced from the annual China Urban Statistical Yearbook published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (https://www.stats.gov.cn/).
Code availability
The analysis was conducted using Python and R. The code used to support the findings of this study is available from the corresponding authors on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge financial support for this research from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42271218, to Y.D.; 42450273, to M.C.; 42571250, to R.L.), which contributed to the conceptualization, design, data collection and decision to publish, as well as from Suzhou University of Science and Technology Talent Recruitment Research Startup Project (332411305, to K.C.), which contributed to the analysis and preparation of the article.
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Y.D., R.L., M.C. and B.F. designed the initial study. K.C., M.C. and R.L. analyzed the data. K.C., T.P., C.S. and K.W. contributed the materials and analysis tools. T.S., C.W. and P.Z. interpreted the results. Y.D., K.C., R.L. and Y.P.W. wrote the article. All co-authors revised the article.
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Nature Cities thanks Ben Derudder, Fulong Wu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Deng, Y., Cao, K., Chen, M. et al. Regulatory effect of China’s city hierarchy on urban redevelopment. Nat Cities 3, 48–57 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00360-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00360-5
