Unveiling citizen-government interactions in urban renewal in China: Spontaneous online opinions, reginal characteristics, and government responsiveness

The prevailing paradigm of traditional top-down urban renewal has been criticized for failing to consider diverse public requests and preferences. This critique has prompted a “human-centric” approach, emphasizing effective two-way communication within urban renewal. Despite this shift, there remains a significant gap in research on real-time public opinions generated from bottom-up participation in urban renewal, particularly with regard to governmental response to such micro-level feedback. Therefore, based on provincial-level panel data and micro-level opinions on the Leaders' Message Board, this research adopted a text mining method and regression model to evaluate unstructured user-generated data and explore the determinants of government responsiveness in urban renewal. The results reveal that there are more public opinions on urban renewal in economically developed regions than in less developed regions. This study also found that local governments can respond to most public opinions. Meanwhile, “project progress inquiry”, “quality problem”, and economic level have significant positive impacts on response timeliness, while “information disclosure” and “livelihood issues” have adverse effects. The findings are of great strategic and policy importance and can offer new insights into citizen engagement and collaborative governance in urban planning. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd