To coincide with the 2022 Winter Olympics, the former Shougang steelworks, built in Beijing from 1919 onwards, has been the subject of a rehabilitation and regeneration project, both to host winter sports events and with a view to becoming a new urban hub for the Chinese capital in the longer term. The redevelopment of this heritage is part of a national strategy to promote industrial know-how and history as an economic and cultural lever. Located in the Shijingshan district, to the west of the city between the fifth and sixth ring roads, the Shougang site benefited from increased visibility, particularly when athlete Gu Eileen won the olympic ski jumping competition in February 2022. Today, the site is designed to remind visitors of the Games’ legacy, as well as to illustrate Shougang’s role in Beijing’s industrial, economic, and social development.

Comprising blast furnaces, silos, and cooling towers, Shougang today represents an architectural and technical feat, in terms of renovating a heavy industrial building and transforming a particularly large production site into a new public space for Shijingshan. Designed to welcome an international public, the circumstances of COVID-19 and related restrictions nevertheless limited the actual visit to Shougang at first. Today, the site is emerging as a leisure area aimed mainly at Beijing’s city dwellers, in line with a policy of developing domestic tourism and consumption. The state-owned company that manages the site, the Shougang Group, adapts its urban planning strategy year by year, between government directives and actual use of the site, with a view to achieving a return on investment, given the massive injection of resources required to rehabilitate such machines by 2022. Between economic and political constraints, and current uses of the site, public and private players are opening areas for adaptation and negotiation around the project. Making the site attractive to local residents and visitors, as well as businesses, is one of the main challenges facing the mixed-use site. What are the strategies for enhancing Shougang’s industrial heritage, and how do they fit in with the urban development project?

How has the post-Olympic Games era been planned? To what extent can this case study represent a new stage in policies for managing industrial heritage and the associated tourism spin-offs?

This work is part of a doctoral research project on the transformation of post-industrial territories during mega-events such as the Olympic Games. This comparative case study between London 2012 and Beijing 2022 uses qualitative methods such as field observation, analysis of urban planning documents, photography, and long, semi-structured interviews. We propose here to take a closer look at the case of Beijing, given recent data collection during a field trip in the summer of 2023.