Abstract: Urban renewal has become a vital policy tool to promote China’s new urbanization. At present, the theoretical construction of this theme mostly focuses on policy design and project process, and few studies touch on its full integration with urban development and urban space governance. This research centers on urban renewal and follows the spatial paradigm to explore the basic form of urban renewal governance theory and its spatial governance paradigm through multi-disciplinary theoretical paths: it starts from the metaphor of urban life, and extends to the space-time view foundation of urban renewal in the history of urban development; it begins from the theoretical approach of “social space”, and moves to “production in space”, followed by “production of space”, for the causes and limitations of urban renewal and the potential possibility of governance transformation; the nest step shifts to the framework of “spatial scale production” and scale politics for the direction of governance turning of coupling space and power analysis; the integrated framework of “space-actor-scale” is formed at length. With the downward shift of scale, urban renewal presents a “co-governance of scale” in spatial governance, forming a system innovation of horizontal dual scale game and vertical convergence of upper and lower scales. Urban renewal, therefore, will bring about China’s urban development a complete change: from growth and capacity expansion to quality improvement and transformation, and it, blessed with such a change, will move towards a prospect of good spatial governance.

Key words: urban renewal, spatial governance, scaling, re-scaling