Abstract
The COVID-19 epidemic has taught us a lesson that cities should be treated like organism and urban planning should follow the laws of urban metabolism. Due to economic laws, industrial parks, with irreplaceable roles in urban vitalities, tend to have shorter period of lifetime than other urban areas and should apply different laws of urban metabolism especially during their urban renewal. The past 30 years has witnessed the continuous increase of industrial parks in China, which however are undergoing the transformation from high-speed to high-quality developments at present. The success of this transformation lies both in the development of local industries and the improvement of physical environments, towards the goal of improving urban economic and social vitalities. While economic competitiveness can be boosted by knowledge-based development, social vitalities can be achieved by enhancing the sense of belongings to attract more knowledge workers, which makes the urban metabolism of industrial parks distinguish from other urban areas. By literature reviews, the characteristics of urban metabolism of industrial parks will be discussed according to the knowledge features. Towards a more efficient and livable urban metabolism, this paper focuses on how to develop adaptive planning strategies in the whole process of urban regeneration of industrial parks by the case study of the Optical Internet Valley(OIV), which used to be an underutilized industrial area lack of economic and social vitalities and aims to be a vibrant knowledge district in the high-tech zone of Wuhan, China. First, the requirements of knowledge industries and knowledge workers in OIV have been studied specifically by face-to-face interviews and on-line investigation. On this basis, against the current problems like traffic jams, shortage in urban amenities and insufficient self-regeneration motivation, a framework of planning strategies towards OIV has been set up including transforming old underutilized spaces to new vibrant places, keeping the balance of new development between infrastructure capacity and economic drivers, customizing adaptive initiatives to motivate local stakeholders and keeping monitoring the implementation of the schemes. By comparing the statistics before and after the schemes, it shows that the implementation of those planning strategies above can not only improve the efficiencies of urban amenities by at least 50 percent but also improve the job densities at least 4 times, which could provide useful references for other industrial areas in need of urban regenerations.
