Evaluating Sustainable Improvement in Suzhou Ancient City: Stakeholder Satisfaction, Sustainability Challenges, and Expert-Guided Pathways

Historic city cores are increasingly expected to perform multiple—and sometimes conflicting—functions: to preserve cultural significance, to serve as everyday living environments, to support economic competitiveness, and to contribute to climate resilience and social inclusion. International doctrine has progressively reframed heritage from a static object of protection to a value-based and people-centered process. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) calls for integrating heritage conservation with broader urban development goals, recognizing that tangible fabric, social practices, and natural systems form an interdependent whole [1]. Complementary International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) principles likewise emphasize safeguarding historic urban areas through integrated planning, appropriate contemporary use, and governance arrangements capable of managing change [2, 3]. Yet, translating such doctrine into actionable strategies remains challenging in fast-growing cities where land markets, tourism, and redevelopment pressures reshape historic environments at high speed.

Suzhou provides a strategically important lens for examining this translation challenge. As one of the oldest cities in the Yangtze River Delta, Suzhou traces formal urban foundations to 514 BCE [4]. Its historic core—widely referred to as Suzhou Ancient City—is characterized by a distinctive water–street morphology and a dense layering of cultural assets, including classical gardens inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List [5]. Suzhou was among the first batch of nationally designated historic and cultural cities in 1982, and municipal policy has repeatedly emphasized “comprehensive protection of the ancient cityscape” as a planning objective [6]. These designations have supported robust conservation institutions; however, they also elevate expectations that heritage will anchor economic development, including cultural industries and tourism growth.

In Suzhou Ancient City, water systems are not only scenic resources but part of everyday infrastructure and cultural identity. Research on Suzhou’s waterscape shows how canals historically organized mobility, commerce, and neighborhood life, producing a spatial culture in which water is embedded in the lived city [7]. More recent spatial vitality research confirms that the quality and accessibility of waterfront space remain important determinants of urban life in the ancient city, shaping perceptions of comfort, identity, and place attachment [8]. These characteristics make Suzhou an instructive case for sustainable improvement because they bind heritage integrity to environmental performance: drainage, water quality, and public-space maintenance directly affect both liveability and authenticity.

Across China, heritage-led regeneration has evolved from demolition-driven renewal toward incremental and conservation-oriented approaches, often framed as micro-regeneration or micro-regeneration. This shift is partly a policy response to contestation and adverse impacts associated with large-scale, property-led redevelopment [9]. In practice, however, incremental renewal can still produce tourism-driven commercialization, rising rents, and indirect displacement. In historic street environments, commercialization may enhance short-term vibrancy but undermine residential liveability and authenticity if everyday functions are crowded out [10]. Suzhou’s emblematic historic streets, such as Pingjiang Road and Shantang Street, have been studied as cases of tourism spatial re-organization and postmodern place consumption [11], illustrating how heritage value can be reinterpreted through leisure economies and branded experiences.

For Suzhou Ancient City, the challenge is not simply whether to develop, but how to guide development so that conservation and improvement reinforce each other rather than compete. Public investments in streetscapes, waterways, and cultural facilities may raise both amenity and land values, generating renewed interest from investors and visitors. At the same time, aging infrastructure, limited space for upgrades, and increasing climate-related risks (e.g., waterlogging) can produce cumulative liveability burdens for long-term residents. Moreover, historic city governance typically involves multiple departments and actors—planning, cultural relics management, housing, tourism, sanitation, traffic, and private operators—whose objectives and incentives may diverge. In this context, expert consultation is often relied upon to interpret doctrine, assess technical constraints, and propose interventions; yet expert recommendations can fail to translate into sustained implementation if they do not align with institutional capacity and stakeholder acceptance.

Within this article, the term sustainable improvement refers to a balanced enhancement of (1) heritage integrity and authenticity, (2) resident liveability and social equity, (3) economic vitality compatible with heritage values, and (4) environmental resilience and long-term maintenance capacity. This definition aligns sustainability-oriented heritage management with broader global urban policy agendas such as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, which emphasize inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities [12, 13]. In a heritage city core, these global aspirations must be translated into locally relevant instruments, including infrastructure renewal, public-service provision, participatory decision processes, and market regulation capable of preventing the erosion of living heritage.

Two gaps motivate this article. Empirically, scholarship on Chinese historic districts has documented tourism commercialization and conservation dilemmas, but fewer studies combine stakeholder satisfaction evidence with expert-elicited strategy pathways across multiple redevelopment typologies within a single historic city core. Conceptually, experts are often discussed either as technical consultants or as instruments of state-driven planning, while their potential—and limits—as boundary actors who can bridge competing stakeholder interests receive less direct attention [14, 15]. Clarifying this bridging function matters because, in heritage contexts, “sustainable improvement” depends on both physical conservation and the social conditions that sustain living heritage.

To address these issues, the study examines Suzhou Ancient City using three forms of evidence: stakeholder surveys, on-site observations, and semi-structured interviews with domain experts. The analysis is organized around three applied questions: Which renewal outcomes are currently viewed as successful by residents and commercial operators? Which stressors and deficits matter most for sustainability? And which strategy portfolio do experts prioritize when navigating technical constraints and stakeholder tensions? The paper first reviews work on the HUL approach, heritage-led regeneration, participation, and the use of expert knowledge in policy. It then outlines the embedded case-study design and data sources. Results are reported in two layers—stakeholder perceptions and stressors across the studied redevelopment sites, followed by expert-diagnosed challenges and strategy pathways—before discussing feasibility, situating the findings in the literature, and proposing a context-appropriate improvement model for Suzhou. The final section summarizes the core findings and translates them into policy recommendations for the Suzhou Municipal Government.

3.1 Research design and case selection

The study adopts a qualitative-dominant, embedded case-study design to examine sustainable improvement challenges and strategies in Suzhou Ancient City. Case-study research is appropriate for complex urban governance environments where contextual factors, stakeholder interactions, and institutional constraints shape outcomes. An embedded design was used to capture variation across redevelopment typologies while maintaining a shared historic-core context.

The study area is Suzhou’s historic core located in Gusu District. It contains dense historic residential neighborhoods, waterways, and mixed-use streets where everyday life and tourism overlap. The district is governed through multiple administrative and sectoral systems, including planning, cultural relics protection, tourism management, community services, sanitation, and traffic. This institutional complexity is central to the study because it shapes both the feasibility of physical upgrades and the effectiveness of participatory governance mechanisms. Suzhou’s policy framing of “protection and utilization” indicates an official intent to couple conservation with contemporary development, but the operational challenge lies in aligning departments and stakeholders around shared sustainability targets [6].

Four redevelopment sites within Suzhou Ancient City were selected to represent typical heritage-led development pathways observed in contemporary Chinese historic cores. The cases include: (1) a neighborhood market renewal (Shuangta Market), representing everyday-service revitalization; (2) a commercial complex insertion (Huanyu Hui), representing mixed retail-led upgrading; (3) a themed heritage-tourism street (Shantang Haishi), representing tourism intensification; and (4) an industrial-heritage creative campus (Sulun Factory regeneration), representing adaptive reuse of industrial fabric. The diversity of these typologies allows assessment of whether perceived outcomes and expert strategies differ between community-oriented renewal and tourism-oriented or investment-oriented redevelopment.

3.2 Data collection: Surveys, observations, and expert interviews

Evidence was assembled from three complementary sources—stakeholder questionnaires, structured field observations, and semi-structured expert interviews. Two questionnaire instruments were administered within Suzhou Ancient City: a resident survey (n = 412 valid responses) and a commercial-operator survey (n = 107 valid responses). In total, 519 valid questionnaires were obtained from 562 distributed (valid response rate = 92.3%). Table 1 summarizes the respondent profile.

Table 1. Survey respondent profile

Questionnaire administration was conducted on-site in Suzhou Ancient City. Recruitment emphasized respondents whose daily living or work is situated in the neighborhoods surrounding the four selected redevelopment cases, so that responses reflect direct experience with the renewal environments examined in this study. For the operator questionnaire, the location distribution reported in Table 1 indicates that responses were obtained primarily from the Pingjiang, Shuangta, and Wumenqiao areas. The resident sample is dominated by long-term residents and includes a higher share of women. This profile suggests that the dataset captures especially the perspectives of established residents, and it may under represent groups that spend less time in neighborhood public spaces during survey periods. Accordingly, the survey results are used as case based evidence of perceived outcomes and stressors rather than as district-wide population estimates.

Most perception measures used five-point Likert-type items. For residents and operators, built-environment and cultural items were measured as satisfaction (1 = very unsatisfactory, 5 = very satisfactory). For several operator-focused items, perceived change was captured using a five-category “growth-rate” scale (significantly decreased, slightly decreased, no change, slightly increased, significantly increased), enabling trend-oriented assessment of transport convenience, customer flow, and economic benefits. To examine distributive stressors, the operator survey also measured perceived rent growth and psychological stress level as ordered categories.

In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten experts involved in Suzhou Ancient City development and management. Experts were purposively selected to capture knowledge across municipal and district planning, architectural design, heritage conservation practice, community governance, and project development and operation. To encourage candour and protect professional confidentiality, interviewees are anonymized as E1–E10. Interview guides focused on perceived development challenges (physical, socio-economic, cultural, and governance) and on implementable strategies for sustainable improvement, including the feasibility of specific policy tools.

In selecting experts, emphasis was placed on individuals who could speak across both conservation and development logics. Interviewees included senior academics in urban planning and design, project managers from renewal and cultural-investment entities, senior architects involved in heritage and adaptive reuse projects, and government or quasi-government officials responsible for historic district management. This diversity supports a more nuanced understanding of how ‘expert strategies’ are shaped by professional positioning and by the institutional arenas in which recommendations must be implemented.

3.3 Data analysis and quality assurance

Survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages). For relationships between categorical variables central to governance and distributive sustainability (e.g., participation vs. overall satisfaction; stress level vs. rent growth), cross-tabulations were produced and Pearson χ² tests were applied. Effect size is reported using Cramér’s V. Where structural zeros occurred in the original response categories (e.g., no respondents reporting rent decreases), categories were consolidated to support interpretable association testing.

Interview transcripts and notes were coded thematically. Initial coding captured issue categories frequently cited in HUL and heritage-led regeneration literature (e.g., authenticity, displacement, infrastructure, participation). Focused coding then consolidated recurring concepts into higher-level themes such as ‘incremental acupuncture renewal,’ ‘nested governance,’ and ‘integration of living and culture.’ Triangulation across surveys, observations, and interviews was used as a quality assurance strategy: where themes emerged in interviews, corresponding evidence was sought in survey patterns and observed site conditions. This triangulation supports analytical credibility by reducing reliance on any single data source.

Qualitative coding was conducted iteratively using a shared coding schema developed from the interview guide and the literature-informed issue domains used in initial coding. Codes were refined through repeated reading of transcripts and field notes, and higher level themes were consolidated by comparing coded segments across interviewees and across the four case settings. To strengthen analytical auditability, the coding schema grouped recurring issues into interpretive themes including infrastructure constraints, mobility pressure, participation deficit, over-commercialization, living heritage continuity, and governance fragmentation, which together structure the expert strategy pathways reported in the Results section.

The research design acknowledges that heritage-led development is a politically and socially sensitive topic. Accordingly, the study reports aggregated survey findings and anonymized expert perspectives. The goal is not to attribute specific claims to named individuals or departments, but to generate actionable knowledge about the types of challenges and strategies that are likely to be relevant for sustainable improvement in Suzhou Ancient City.

A final aspect of quality assurance concerns interpretive balance. In heritage districts, different stakeholders may interpret the same outcome in opposing ways—for example, tourist influx may be seen as economic vitality by some businesses but as crowding and privacy loss by residents. The study therefore treats stakeholder perception differences as analytically meaningful, not as measurement error. This approach is consistent with value-based heritage management, which recognizes that heritage ‘values’ are plural and negotiated [1].

5.1 Interpreting Suzhou’s challenges through HUL and heritage-led regeneration research

The findings reinforce a central insight of HUL: in historic city cores, sustainability is not a single-domain problem but an integration challenge. Survey patterns suggest that visible improvements and basic order can coexist with persistent deficits in participation and service convenience. This duality mirrors the implementation gap documented in HUL scholarship, where heritage-led development may adopt integrated rhetoric but remain uneven in practice due to institutional fragmentation and insufficient community influence [16, 17]. In Suzhou, the physical constraints of a dense water–street fabric intensify this gap because infrastructure upgrades and mobility management require cross-department coordination and long-term investment, not only surface-level urban design.

Suzhou’s case also aligns with Chinese and international research on tourismification and commercialization. Expert concern about over-commercialization echoes prior analyses of Suzhou’s historic streets as postmodern consumption spaces [11] and of resident–tourist tensions along Pingjiang Road [10]. The commercial operator stress associated with rent increases provides micro-level evidence consistent with broader displacement frameworks. While the present study does not measure displacement directly, the combination of rent pressure and stress signals a risk pathway through which traditional businesses may be replaced, contributing to functional homogenization and weakened living heritage. This resonates with tourism gentrification accounts in which visitor-oriented redevelopment changes local business ecosystems and erodes everyday affordability [21, 22].

An additional implication concerns how different redevelopment typologies shape sustainability outcomes. The market renewal case demonstrates that upgrading can strengthen social infrastructure when it sustains everyday functions and fosters inclusive public space. By contrast, themed tourism streets can generate high short-term revenue but may require stronger externality management tools to protect residential liveability. This typology-based differentiation suggests that policy should not apply a single model of ‘successful renewal’ to all historic areas; rather, governance instruments and evaluation criteria should be tailored to the dominant function and stakeholder mix of each sub-area within the ancient city.

5.2 Feasibility of expert strategies: Technical, institutional, and financial considerations

A key contribution of the expert interviews is the emphasis on implementability. The proposed ‘acupuncture-style’ renewal approach is technically feasible in Suzhou’s historic fabric because it reduces the need for large-scale demolition and allows infrastructure upgrades to be staged. Incremental interventions can focus on the most critical failure points—drainage hotspots, barrier-free routes, and neighborhood facilities—while respecting conservation constraints. Such staging is consistent with adaptive reuse and incremental renewal literature, which highlights that small-scale interventions can mitigate disruption and enable learning-by-doing [9, 33].

Institutional feasibility, however, depends on governance architecture. Experts’ call for nested, cross-department coordination responds directly to the fragmentation barrier. From a policy utilization standpoint, this can be interpreted as an attempt to move expert knowledge from symbolic legitimization toward instrumental use [15]. To succeed, coordination platforms must have decision authority, stable funding streams, and accountability mechanisms that extend beyond individual projects. Without such authority, expert panels risk functioning as advisory bodies whose recommendations remain optional or are selectively adopted.

Financial feasibility requires aligning funding models with long-term maintenance and distributive fairness. Heritage-led redevelopment often relies on commercial revenue and land-value uplift; yet in historic cores, value capture can accelerate rent increases that undermine local-serving functions. The expert proposal of dedicated maintenance funds financed partly through tourism revenues is therefore significant, as it links externality generation (visitor flows) to externality management (infrastructure and services). This approach is consistent with the argument that public investment should include mechanisms to protect vulnerable stakeholders and maintain social diversity [23]. In Suzhou, such funds could be paired with targeted subsidies for resident-serving amenities and traditional businesses, reducing the risk that renewal evolves into a purely visitor-oriented economy.

Property rights and regulatory feasibility represent an additional dimension of implementation risk. In historic cores, buildings often have complex ownership patterns and usage rights that complicate repairs, relocation, and adaptive reuse. Guo et al. [35] demonstrated how unclear property rights in Suzhou’s Pingjiang Historic Block can delay renewal and generate conflict. Expert strategies that assume smooth redevelopment processes may therefore underperform unless accompanied by governance mechanisms that clarify responsibilities, standardize negotiation procedures, and provide legal and financial support for conservation compliance.

5.3 Balancing stakeholder interests: Toward people-centered, expert-facilitated governance

Balancing stakeholder interests in Suzhou Ancient City involves at least four groups: long-term residents, commercial operators, visitors, and municipal/district authorities. These groups share an interest in a safe and attractive environment, but differ in priorities regarding affordability, access, and functional identity. Resident survey results indicating moderate participation satisfaction suggest that existing mechanisms may not sufficiently empower residents to shape renewal choices. This condition reflects Arnstein’s [30] critique that consultation without decision influence can function as tokenism. From a sustainable heritage perspective, such tokenism is risky because it can erode stewardship and weaken the social foundations of living heritage.

Experts’ strategy of integrating residents’ everyday life with cultural activation provides a concrete pathway for balancing interests. Rather than separating ‘heritage display’ from ‘daily living,’ the strategy seeks to sustain a mixed-use environment where markets, community services, and cultural practices coexist with visitor experiences. This approach aligns with ICCROM’s people-centered heritage guidance [18] and with collaborative governance arguments that emphasize learning and trust-building across networks [31]. However, collaboration requires institutional design: community representatives need recognized roles, information must be accessible, and conflict-resolution mechanisms must be available when development pressures create trade-offs.

For commercial operators, the rent–stress association highlights the importance of economic instruments in stakeholder balancing. If renewal raises costs faster than revenues, small businesses may exit, and the commercial mix may shift toward capital-intensive chains and standardized formats. This outcome would undermine both local identity and the diversity that supports resilient urban economies. Therefore, balancing interests likely requires a differentiated policy regime in which local-serving, heritage-compatible businesses receive stronger protection and support than purely extractive or low-compatibility uses. Such differentiation is consistent with research emphasizing that heritage areas require governance tools that manage market dynamics rather than simply attracting investment [20, 21].

A further balancing challenge concerns the role of experts themselves. Experts may be positioned as neutral technical advisors, yet their knowledge and recommendations are embedded in institutional contexts and professional norms. Haas’s [28] epistemic community concept suggests that experts can consolidate a shared problem definition that guides policy, but it also implies that certain values may be privileged if expert communities are not diverse. To avoid technocratic bias, Suzhou’s governance architecture could formalize plural expertise, including social service professionals, community organizers, and small-business representatives, alongside planners and architects. Such pluralization would strengthen the capacity of expert consultation to bridge stakeholder interests rather than reinforce a single development narrative.

5.4 Operationalizing sustainability: Indicators, monitoring, and adaptive management

A recurring gap in HUL implementation is the difficulty of defining measurable indicators that connect heritage values to urban management decisions [16]. The present findings suggest that Suzhou could operationalize sustainable improvement through an indicator system organized around four domains: liveability, authenticity, resilience, and governance. Liveability indicators can include resident satisfaction with safety, noise, cleanliness, mobility, and service access—dimensions already partially captured in the present survey. Authenticity indicators can include the retention of residential population, the share of local-serving businesses, and the continuity of neighborhood cultural practices, reflecting living heritage principles [18].

Resilience indicators can track flood-risk exposure, drainage performance, permeable surface ratios, and maintenance response times, integrating sponge-city logic within heritage constraints [36]. Governance indicators can include participation reach (e.g., the proportion of households engaged in deliberation processes), transparency measures (e.g., public disclosure of renewal budgets and decision rationales), and the responsiveness of agencies to documented complaints. Such an indicator system would support adaptive management: projects could be adjusted when indicators reveal rising externalities or declining resident satisfaction, rather than relying on one-time post-completion evaluations.

In institutional terms, monitoring requires data stewardship and authority. Experts’ suggestion of a dedicated ancient city coordination unit is therefore critical: without an entity responsible for collecting, interpreting, and acting upon indicator data, monitoring risks becoming a reporting exercise disconnected from decision-making. Embedding monitoring within a cross-department unit would also help align incentives away from short-term visual outputs toward long-term performance, consistent with the sustainability framing of both global urban agendas and HUL doctrine [1, 13].

5.5 Proposed sustainable heritage improvement model for Suzhou Ancient City

Based on the triangulated findings, the article proposes a “people-centered, expert-facilitated, incremental renewal” model as a context-appropriate sustainable heritage improvement pathway for Suzhou Ancient City. The model brings together four principles. It takes incremental renewal as the default implementation logic, prioritizing targeted interventions that address critical deficits without triggering large-scale displacement or loss of historic fabric. It also treats living heritage as a core conservation objective: maintaining resident presence and daily functions is understood as part of heritage value, not merely a social add-on [1, 18].

A further element is the institutionalization of expert consultation as governance infrastructure rather than as a project-by-project advisory process. In practice, this implies a permanent cross-department “ancient city sustainability unit” with an expert panel and community representation. The unit would oversee integrated planning, coordinate infrastructure works, evaluate proposals against sustainability indicators, and manage long-term maintenance funds. Such an arrangement operationalizes HUL integration by ensuring that heritage, mobility, sanitation, tourism, and community services are addressed within a shared decision framework [16, 17].

The model also embeds distributive instruments to manage commercialization and tourism externalities. These include a heritage maintenance and community services fund financed by tourism-related revenues; targeted subsidies and lease-support mechanisms for traditional businesses and community-serving functions; and adaptive reuse governance mechanisms that clarify responsibilities and reduce transaction costs where property rights are complex [35]. By embedding these instruments, the model seeks to prevent the “success trap” in which rising popularity accelerates rent increases and functional homogenization, weakening the very heritage values that attract visitors.

Operationally, implementation can be structured as a phased pathway. Short-term actions (1–2 years) focus on quick-win infrastructure and service upgrades at micro-scales—drainage bottlenecks, barrier-free access, sanitation improvements, and community facilities—coupled with transparent participation pilots. Medium-term actions (3–5 years) institutionalize governance platforms, expand monitoring indicators, and implement economic instruments for business mix management. Long-term actions (5+ years) integrate climate resilience, including sponge-city measures, into district-wide infrastructure renewal and public-space strategies [36]. The phased pathway reflects an implementation-sensitive approach to evidence use, increasing the likelihood that expert strategies translate into sustained improvement rather than one-off projects [15].

5.6 Theoretical contributions

The findings extend HUL scholarship by illustrating that sustainability performance in a heritage city can be uneven. In Suzhou, strong ratings on symbolic and public-order dimensions (identity, safety, cultural activities) coexist with acute deficits in everyday systems (mobility convenience) and distributive conditions (rent stress). This pattern supports calls to treat heritage conservation as an integrated urban-management problem rather than a sectoral exercise [1, 16, 37].

Table 5 quantifies the participation–satisfaction relationship and shows that even limited participation is associated with markedly different legitimacy evaluations in a Chinese historic-core context. This result lends empirical support to classic and contemporary participation theory [30, 31, 38] and complements China-focused evidence that participation mechanisms may exist procedurally but remain weak unless institutional design makes them influential in heritage decision-making [14, 26].

Beyond participation, the analysis contributes to policy-knowledge and expert-governance literature by specifying how expert consultation can operate as durable governance infrastructure—an epistemic coordination device—rather than a one-off advisory input. In this model, experts function as boundary actors who translate heritage values, engineering constraints, and social-equity trade-offs into implementable packages [15, 28, 29, 39].

Operator data further underline how distributive pressures shape perceived sustainability. The rent–stress association (Table 4) suggests that heritage-led upgrading can create cost burdens that matter even when customer flows rise, aligning with tourism gentrification and displacement research in historic districts [21, 22, 23] and with Suzhou-specific accounts of tensions along tourism streets [10, 11].

5.7 Policy implications for Suzhou Municipal Government

For Suzhou Municipal Government, the results imply that sustainable improvement is less a single project choice than an institutional arrangement capable of coordinating heritage conservation, mobility, public services, and commercial management. Consistent with UNESCO’s HUL Recommendation and the New Urban Agenda, a practical step would be a permanent ancient-city integrated-management unit (or an inter-departmental steering mechanism) with a clear mandate to align conservation with infrastructure and social policy, supported by routine monitoring of resident liveability and business-viability indicators [1, 13].

Mobility appears to be the binding constraint. The exceptionally negative transportation ratings among residents point to the need for a coherent demand-management strategy that addresses car-parking supply, freight delivery, tourist coach access, and last-mile accessibility. In many historic cores, practical packages combine peripheral parking with timed shuttles, access-control windows for logistics, and pedestrian-first street design—implemented in ways that respect historic townscapes while preserving everyday resident access, as emphasized in ICOMOS principles [2, 3].

Participation mechanisms also need to move beyond occasional consultation toward repeatable co-governance routines. Given the strong association between participation and satisfaction, municipal and subdistrict actors could institutionalize neighborhood forums and co-design workshops at key milestones, coupled with feedback loops that document how resident input changes designs. The aim is not simply higher participation counts, but meaningful influence—consistent with participation ladders and collaborative planning theory [30, 31, 38] and with evidence on community participation in Chinese heritage management [14, 32].

To manage tourismification and commercialization externalities without undermining the local economy, Suzhou could combine business-mix management (protecting daily-life services), rent and lease monitoring, and targeted fiscal instruments (e.g., differentiated taxes, subsidies for essential services, or support for long-standing tenants). Such distributive tools reflect displacement research, which shows that market-led upgrading can push out both residents and locally embedded businesses when protective instruments are absent [21-23].

In practice, implementation can lean on micro-regeneration and adaptive reuse to minimize disruption and protect authenticity while improving performance. Small-scale, participatory micro-regeneration has been advanced in China as a way to reconcile heritage values with modern services [9], while adaptive reuse research emphasizes aligning technical upgrades with institutional and property-rights realities [33-35]. Given Suzhou’s water-sensitive urban form, integrating resilience-oriented drainage and flood-risk measures—such as sponge-city approaches—can protect both heritage fabric and resident well-being [36].