What Drives Urban Renewal in the Digital Era? Evidence from Public Data Openness

Urban renewal (UR) increasingly depends on the precise identification of the existing spatial stock and on cross-departmental coordination. Treating the staggered launch of local government data openness platforms as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper uses panel data on 282 cities over 2009–2024 and applies staggered difference-in-differences to test whether public data openness (PDO) improves UR. PDO raises the urban renewal index by 0.0019 to 0.0090, about 2% to 9% of the sample mean. The baseline estimate of 0.0090 is the upper end of this range. The local effect is 0.0040 after controlling for simultaneous openness in neighboring cities, and the estimate falls to 0.0019 when the time-varying effects of multiple predetermined characteristics are jointly controlled for. The increase comes mainly from facility improvements within existing built-up areas rather than outward urban expansion. PDO works mainly by promoting green technology innovation and raising land resource allocation efficiency, while the evidence for innovative talent inflow is weaker. The effect of PDO is stronger in cities with higher openness quality, better digital foundations, and higher administrative rank. PDO is also significantly associated with UR improvements in neighboring cities, mainly within about 300 km. Therefore, shifting PDO from platform construction toward data quality improvement and strengthening data coordination within city clusters will help achieve sustainable UR.