Geodesign for Sustainability and Vitality

In response to shifting global trade tensions since the mid-to-late 2010s and growing environmental pressures, industrial zones in China started pursuing high-quality development. This "high-quality development" signifies a profound adjustment in China's urbanisation strategy, marking a shit from the previous pursuit of rapid construction focused on "quantity and scale" to a new target on connotative development emphasising "quality and efficiency." Within this new paradigm, industrial zones are no longer just isolated carriers of economic activity but are repositioned as comprehensive platforms in China's new urbanisation strategy, intended to achieve effective population aggregation, regional sustainability, optimise industrial structure, and promote the high-quality development of urban space. Along with this transformation, industrial parks face a new set of challenges, including path dependency from legacy industries, a mismatch between industrial upgrading and the available labour skillset, and conflicts over land use coupled with high redevelopment costs, which can limit the success of their high-quality development. The prevailing government solution for industrial park transformation is a top-down, centralised push for structural modernization (e.g., high-tech introduction, energy mandates). This rapid approach, while improving economic and environmental efficiency, often creates a gap between its top-down goals and local needs, risking the marginalization of local stakeholders by prioritizing large-scale projects and externalizing development costs onto residents and labourers. The industrial zone is not merely a collection of firms; it is a complex socio-economic ecosystem. Its successful transformation hinges on the health of the connections within that system. Therefore, the most critical intervention is not simply to introduce another technology or another top-down policy. It is to build the collaborative framework and achieve fair design outcomes for all stakeholders, including the creation of neutral platforms for dialogue, data-sharing agreements, public-private partnerships for green infrastructure, and co-chaired committees to address uneven spatiotemporal resource distribution problems. This research aims to fill this gap by developing a geodesign-based theoretical framework and evaluating it through a case-based application. The framework provides practical guidelines for translating diverse, and often conflicting, stakeholder values into shared design principles and phased actions. Based on this, this study raises the following research questions: RQ1 / Study 1: How can stakeholder values be translated into shared design priorities and an initial project library? RQ2 / Study 2: How can these priorities be structured to prepare participatory digital geodesign for sustainable and resilient planning? RQ3 / Study 3: How can GDH-based methodological extensions support negotiated sustainable scenario selection? RQ4 / Study 4: How can vitality evidence refine selected sustainable scenarios through population-attraction assessment? Using a multi-stage, mixed-methods approach, the author ran three iterative gGeodesign workshops and toolkits in five industrial parks across China, involving 92 participants and 227 villages. The framework tackles three common hurdles: weak value integration, data silos, and narrow, single-track design. It starts with an offline socio-technical systems process that builds common ground through participatory diagnosis and mapping. That consensus then moves into an online geodesignhub platform, where stakeholders negotiate spatial options and model scenarios in real time using shared data. By adding simple “similarity weights” (which show how closely different groups’ project choices align) and clear explanatory models for sustainability and vitality, the process shifts planning from intuition to transparent, evidence-based decisions and turns conflict into workable agreements. This research makes three main contributions: (1) insights derived from four empirical studies; (2) three evidence-based design prototypes to support industrial-zone transformation, including a values framework and sustainability and vitality models; and (3) a toolkit that converts the new research knowledge into practice-ready formats for design. The results show that industrial zones need a practical way to make community values explicit and broad sustainability goals actionable. Collaborative geodesign offers a fair space for dialogue and co-creation, and a data-driven negotiation process that can improve the transparency and inclusivity of decisions. In turn, the vitality and quality of built outcomes.