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Approach to Value Enhancement Through Capital Synergy in the Urban Regeneration Field
Author:Peng Shanni, Zhai Yuqi

Abstract: Urban regeneration requires a systematic pathway for value enhancement that integrates economic efficiency, social benefits, and co-creation of composite value. Taking the regeneration of the Eastern Historic District of Changning, Shanghai, as an empirical case, this paper describes and explains the process and mechanism of capital entry, capital synergy, and value enhancement in the urban regeneration field. Drawing on field theory, it constructs a multidimensional capital model that includes economic, institutional, social, innovation, and symbolic capital, and focuses on how multidimensional capital synergy produces value enhancement in urban regeneration. The study finds that the pathway operates as follows: economic capital serves as the foundation, institutional capital provides regulation, and different forms of capital accumulate, exchange, and transmit value through field practice, enabling reproduction; social and innovation capital act as mediators, while symbolic capital provides the orientation. Within the urban regeneration field, the hierarchical relationship among multiple forms of capital takes a quasi-pyramidal form. Through the upgrading of capital synergy, capital gains legitimacy, generates productive forces such as premium effects and resource attraction, and then feeds back into different forms of capital, forming a sustainable closed loop of value enhancement. This process corresponds to the core metaphor of Bourdieu's capital theory, "social alchemy"; this paper conceptualizes its spatial operation as "spatial alchemy."