WANG Yueran, SUN Jie, MA Guoqiang

Keywords： office-to-residential conversion; urban renewal; adaptive reuse; planning approval; first- and second-tier large city

Abstract：

Adaptive transforming and reusing old buildings has become an important issue in the UK and the USA for several decades as they entered into urban renewal era. In order to promote the transformation of excess spare offices into housings which was in short supply, both the British and American governments introduced planning permits deregulation and multiple financial incentives. The “office-to-residential conversion” programs have surely resulted in more housing supply, population return and economic revival in the inner-city. However, due to the imperfection of the relevant regulation, it also caused the loss of cheap offices especially for small businesses and the loss of planning gains indirectly. In addition, some “office-to-residential conversion”programs also result in poor-quality housings, mismatched housing types and housings’location out of control, which cannot contribute to increase housing affordability for the poor. In this paper, we argue that Chinese first- and second-tier large cities can learn from the “office-to-residential conversion” experience critically, that local government should provide tax reduction, finance supports, and also needs to strengthen planning approval regulation and guidance for old buildings reusing, and improve the rental housing policy.

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