Objective China’s renovation of old residential neighborhood has entered a critical phase of governance transformation, requiring not only physical upgrading but also institutional refinement. This study aims to examine the evolutionary characteristics and urban variation of policies on old residential neighborhoods from 2005 to 2025. Specifically, it seeks to investigate how central and local governments, operating across multiple governance tiers, continuously adjust and refine policy content through processes of policy formulation, reinterpretation, and contextualized specification. By doing so, the study provides empirical evidence for understanding the mechanisms underlying the evolution of old residential neighborhood renovation policies in China and offers insights into future directions for institutional improvement and governance innovation.

Methods The study constructs a comprehensive policy corpus covering central and local renovation policies issued between 2005 and 2025. A hybrid natural language processing framework, combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and Word2Vec word-embedding analysis, is employed to extract the latent thematic structures of policies and identify changes in policy discourse across different stages. LDA is used to obtain the dominant policy themes at each historical phase, forming a document−topic−word matrix that captures the core governance concerns. Word2Vec is then applied to train semantic vector spaces based on contextual co-occurrence, enabling the calculation of cosine similarity between themes. In addition, the study systematically analyzes the most recent eight batches of List of replicable policies and mechanisms for old residential neighborhood renovation issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) through close qualitative reading. These Lists serve as an institutional mechanism through which the central government identifies, abstracts, and institutionalizes best practices generated at the local level. By examining their thematic distribution and governance features, the study further identifies the current discursive composition and institutional characteristics of China’s renovation policies.

Results The findings reveal a clear staged evolution in the overall policy discourse on old residential neighborhood renovation. Policy priorities have shifted from an initial emphasis on basic institutional construction-such as spatial renovation, property management, and funding mechanisms-to a more comprehensive refinement of governance instruments. In recent years, the discourse increasingly highlights multi-actor collaborative governance, long-term operation and maintenance, resident participation, and integrated resource mobilization, reflecting a broader transition from project-based administrative management towards more participatory, coordinated, and institutionalized governance approaches. At the local level, policy development initially exhibited significant differentiation shaped by cities’ varying governance capacities, fiscal conditions, and neighborhood characteristics. Megacities and super-large cities pioneered innovations in complex areas including financial integration, responsibility allocation, and long-term management mechanisms, whereas many medium and small cities first prioritized spatial quality enhancement and funding security. Over time, these differentiated policy explorations have gradually converged towards deeper institutionalization; local policy frameworks increasingly aligned around coordinated governance mechanisms, clearer stakeholder responsibilities, and sustainable management arrangements. List of replicable policies and mechanisms represents a policy instrument through which the central government identifies, validates, and institutionalizes best practices emerging from local contexts. The List provide modular, operable, and governance-oriented policy solutions that serve as important references for cities nationwide. Empirical analysis shows that, since the fourth batch, the List have increasingly foregrounded governance-oriented themes, including collaborative decision-making, stakeholder coordination, operational sustainability, and procedural standardization. Further analysis of the provincial- and city-level distribution of experience sources indicates that, in compiling the List of replicable policies and mechanisms, the central government tends to draw more heavily on practices from regions with substantial renovation demands and relatively mature policy frameworks. In particular, the List predominantly select cases from megacities and large cities as representative examples.

Conclusion The study concludes that the formulation of old residential neighborhood renovation policies in China has undergone a systemic transformation, evolving from localized policy experimentation toward more comprehensive institutional construction. Governance investment has continued to intensify, driving the policy system toward clearer governance logic, more standardized mechanisms, and greater emphasis on collaborative, sustainable, and resident-centered approaches. Within this transformation, the discursive composition of the Replicable Mechanism Lists reflects a clear shift in the attention of higher-level governments, with governance innovation and institutional refinement emerging as central focal points in advancing subsequent stages of renovation. By recognizing and showcasing exemplary practices, the Lists also generate incentive effects that stimulate renewed local governance innovation across different regions. Looking ahead, integrating the concept of design governance into old residential neighborhood renovation provides a promising pathway for addressing increasingly complex governance challenges. By enhancing problem identification, improving scheme formulation, and strengthening communication among diverse actors, the concept of “design governance” can effectively support the shift toward multi-actor collaboration and high-quality governance. Taken together, these efforts can contribute to building high-performance governance systems, fostering high-quality living environments, and advancing the sustainable transformation of China’s urban regeneration agenda.