Mapping Inclusion-Relevant Spatial Perceptions in Historic-District Renewal: A Lefebvre-Based Spatial Evaluation Framework

As urban renewal shifts toward existing stock, historic-district regeneration requires evaluation methods that address material conditions, governance, and lived experience. Conventional physical metrics often miss subjective perceptions of access, management, and lived experience. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, this study develops an operational, case-specific framework using user-generated content from Google Maps and Xiaohongshu. The analysis combines frozen BERT representations and K-means clustering for Gran Clariana, Barcelona (N = 876), with deterministic lexicon matching and corpus-specific sentiment procedures for two Shanghai historic districts (N = 522) and Het Westerpark, Amsterdam (N = 1310). In Shanghai, Spatial Practice was the most frequent dominant dimension, whereas Representational Space had the highest within-category positive sentiment share. For Gran Clariana, K = 3 was the most stable solution tested (mean ARI = 0.974), while Landscape Perceived Value was the leading profile discriminator (Welch F = 48.98, p < 0.001). In Westerpark, Spatial Practice was most lexically prominent, and Representational Space showed the largest, though weak, positive association with VADER sentiment (r = 0.138, p < 0.001). Taken together, these case-specific, exploratory mappings lack external validation but complement post-occupancy evaluation by interpreting platform-visible, inclusion-relevant perceptions rather than measuring demographic representation, affordability, accessibility compliance, or distributive justice.