Financial Focus | From "Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau" to "Housing and Betterment Bureau," a single character change reveals new ideas in urban development

Recently, online discussions have been sparked about some places in Hubei Province renaming their “Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau” to a “Housing and Urban Renewal Bureau.” What considerations are behind this one-character change—from “housing and construction” to “housing renewal”?

In May 2024, Hubei Province launched an institutional reform of the housing and construction departments. Within just one month, all 17 cities (prefectures) in the province and all directly administered counties under the province completed their official postings, achieving full provincial coverage of the “Housing Renewal Bureau.”

A relevant person in charge of the Hubei Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development explained that this round of adjustments is intended to further coordinate urban renewal work, and promote a transformation in the way cities are developed—from “scale expansion” to “renewal-enhancing quality and smart growth.” Hubei Province’s housing and construction department had previously already adjusted and set up the Housing Security and Urban Renewal Office.

China’s urbanization is shifting from a period of rapid growth to one of stable development, and urban development is moving from a stage dominated by large-scale incremental expansion to a stage focused mainly on improving quality and increasing efficiency in existing stock.

“Since urban development is shifting from outward, extension-style expansion to inward, connotation-driven development, we need to focus on addressing issues such as the aging of old urban areas and the deterioration of basic infrastructure,” said Chen Shuyun, president of the Hubei Urban Reform and Development Research Association. She noted that the incremental expansion stage applies to standards and processes for large-scale development and no longer fully fits current needs. The institutional reform from “housing and construction” to “housing renewal” is precisely meant to tackle these pain points.

The “14th Five-Year Plan outline” proposes to advance high-quality urban renewal, conduct urban health checks, accelerate the construction of complete communities, and improve the urban renewal implementation mechanism.

A comprehensive parking structure building newly constructed on vacant land within the Zhongyin East Garden residential community in Hanyang District, Wuhan, Hubei. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

As a mega city, Wuhan’s urban area has a resident population of more than 10 million, and it is one of the earliest industrial cities in China to be laid out after the founding of New China. Large numbers of old factory buildings and old residential communities are distributed across the city.

In November 2025, Wuhan issued and implemented the “Five-Revamp Four-Good” action plan to accelerate high-quality urban renewal. The plan clarifies that over three years, there will be coordinated “five revamps” of existing buildings, old residential communities, old streets, old factory areas, and urban villages, targeting the “Four Good” goals of good housing, good communities, good neighborhoods (urban areas), and good districts.

“After the organizational name change, the focus of urban work has shifted from incremental construction to enhancing the quality of existing stock. Next, we will use the ‘Five-Revamp Four-Good’ framework as a lever to promote urban renewal, refresh business formats, and drive governance innovation,” said Zhang Zhuo, Party Secretary of the Party Group of the Wuhan Housing and Urban Renewal Bureau.

In the past, local housing and construction bureaus in Hubei focused more on approval supervision, engineering construction, and the like, and their main responsibilities were urban development “from nothing to something.” Now, the Housing Renewal Bureau has been assigned functions including overall coordination of urban renewal, housing security, municipal maintenance, and protection of historical and cultural heritage.

Taking Wuhan as an example, the Housing Renewal Bureau integrated the responsibilities of the former Housing Security and Housing Administration Bureau and the former Urban-Rural Construction Bureau. It brought housing security, real-estate market supervision and regulation, urban renewal, and renovation of old residential communities under unified management, aiming to address long-standing problems such as the difficulty of coordinating among multiple departments and the slow approval process for issues like installing elevators in old residential communities and renovating exterior walls.

Chen Shuyun believes that this functional integration breaks the fragmented governance of the previous “separation of construction and management,” which is conducive to advancing hardware renovation and software upgrades in parallel.

The reporter saw at the perimeter fencing of the project site for the old-and-risky housing renovation project in the southern area of Hubei University that two buildings have already topped out. Workers are carrying out interior partition wall masonry, laying outdoor utility pipelines, and installing basement pipeline equipment. Previously, the old-and-risky housing renovation project of Hubei University had been included in Wuhan’s first batch of old-and-risky housing renovation projects, and residents are about to move into new homes on the original site.

Thinking about moving into the new home with an elevator, 75-year-old retired teacher Huang has nothing but joy to share. She and her husband live in an old house from the 1980s and 1990s, and as the years pass, all kinds of problems have come one after another.

The reporter learned that since the renaming, Housing Renewal Bureaus across Hubei have taken residents’ livelihood needs as the primary orientation, and have worked with full effort to promote projects that address shortcomings and strengthen supporting facilities.

A set of data shows the results: in 2025, Wuhan completed renovation of 258 urban old residential communities in total; during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, Hubei Province renovated 18,400 urban old residential communities in total, and installed and updated more than 10,000 elevators, benefiting 2.7 million households.

Urban renewal is not only a livelihood project, but also contains huge potential demand. Implementing key tasks such as renovating urban old residential communities, renovating old streets, renovating old industrial plant buildings, and updating and renovating urban infrastructure can strongly boost investment and consumption.

Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Hubei Province is located deep in the Wuling Mountains. The entire county town has been built into a 4A-level scenic area. The local government adopts a “micro-renewal, incremental approach” strategy—finding opportunities to add greenery where possible, removing walls to let greenery pass through—and promotes old residential community renovation and scenic-area upgrading in a coordinated manner.

“Urban renewal actions have completely refreshed the look of the urban area and provided tourists with a better experience,” said a relevant person in charge of the Enshi Housing and Urban Renewal Bureau. Through this action, Enshi added nearly 80,000 square meters of newly opened green space, built and renovated 15 “pocket parks,” and shared more than 3,500 parking spaces among government offices and agencies.

On July 19, 2025, residents and tourists watched cultural performances along the Gongshui River in Gongshui River in Enshi County, Hubei (drone photo). Photo by Chen Xukai, Xinhua News Agency

Looking across the country, cities are taking frequent actions in urban renewal.

In February 2026, Beijing released the list of 1,321 urban renewal plan projects for 2026, with planned investment of 1049.5 billion yuan. Guangzhou recently held the first-quarter urban renewal project investment matchmaking conference, focusing on promoting 39 urban renewal projects with a total investment of nearly 300 billion yuan. In 2025, the Sichuan Urban Renewal Group, the Zhejiang Construction Investment Urban Operation Group, and others were successively unveiled and established.

“After the signboard is changed, the concepts, functions, and work style must all be updated at the same time,” said Chen Shuyun. She emphasized that advancing high-quality urban renewal requires more than renaming—it is more important to sort out internal functions, establish dedicated urban renewal specialized institutions, take into account both function adjustment and capacity transformation, and promote “physical integration” and “chemical fusion” to write a “new chapter” in urban renewal. (Reporters Gong Liankang and Zhang Yang)