Objective The design of Yangpu riverside public space integrates the designer's thinking on the social, economic, and cultural characteristics of the post-industrial era into the enormous material base of industrial relics. This research selects the regeneration of Yangpu riverside public space, a typical case of urban renewal in the post-industrial era, as the research object, and summarizes the space production characteristics thereof.

Methods Taking the space production theory of Henri Lefebvre as the analytical perspective, this research verifies the space production characteristics of the regeneration of Shanghai Yangpu riverside public space by the empirical research method. The theory of space production combines the material aspect of urban space with the aspect of consciousness. In addition to the materiality of urban space, Henri Lefebvre's theory pays more attention to the significance of urban space in the reorganization of social elements, the expression of social relations, and the carrier of social order. In his book The Production of Space written in 1974, Henri Lefebvre proposes the famous "Spatial Triad" theory, which indicates that the production of social space shows three attributes — "spatial practice" in the material realm, "spatial representation" in the spiritual realm, and "representative space" in the social realm. These three attributes correspond to three types of production, namely perceivable material production, conceptual knowledge production, and experiential meaning production. The three types of production are integrated in the overall process of social space production, which is always accompanied by contradictions and differences.

Results The regeneration of Yangpu riverside public space conforms to the general characteristics of Lefebvre's space production theory, and also has the uniqueness of urban renewal in the post-industrial era. Through reviewing the regeneration of Yangpu riverside public space within the framework of Lefebvre's space production theory, the research finds that the urban renewal process involved is a typical transformation from "dominated space" to "occupied space". The former refers to the space dominated by nature and craftsmanship in the industrial era, while the latter refers to the space occupied by the daily life in the post-industrial era. In terms of the capital attributes of existing urban industrial areas, the fundamentals of economic cycle can provide a deterministic analytical framework for the spatial practice of the renewal of existing urban industrial areas. Yangpu riverside area participates in the urban economic cycle with the role of urban fixed capital to obtain value appreciation, especially after entering the third cycle. The reason why the renewal of the riverside area of Yangpu has achieved successful results is that the whole renewal process follows the development sequence of the third economic cycle, and is based on spatial justice. The practice has contributed a positive response to the crisis of space ethics in the post-industrial era. From this point of view, the holding of the 2019 Shanghai Urban Space Art Season (SUSAS) in the riverside area of Yangpu in the theme of "encounter", not only implies a transformation from the "industrial rust belt" to the "life show belt", but also brings the new riverside area back to the city as a new daily center. Since then, on the 5.5 km long shoreline of the Huangpu River, the distribution of public spaces, the intervention of public art works, and the planning and implementation of exhibition activities have formed an urban landscape featuring the coexistence of certainty and uncertainty, which may well confirm Henri Lefebvre's declaration on "the right to enter the city" that mainly involves a clear-cut opposition to the privatization of urban public space and an expectation for the heterogeneity of urban centers.

Conclusion From the perspective of space production, the Yangpu riverside public space has the following three notable features: its spatial practice is essentially the reshaping of the spatial and temporal order of the industrial era by urban renewal in the post-industrial era, which can advance the transformation of a space from being dominated by nature and industry to being used for the daily life of the public; its spatial appearance turns to be a symbiosis of certainty and uncertainty, namely the certainty of industrial context, functional demand and environmental endowment, and the uncertainty of spatial experience, construction principle and ecological intervention; its representative space is manifested as the return to daily life, which is associated with the urban context and micro-geographical advantages, and appears to be a new carrier of urban space justice as an organic supplement to Shanghai's social structure adjustment and spatial production model in the post-industrial era. Different from the static research on a single case, this research attempts to review the Yangpu riverside public space in Shanghai as an ever-changing urban landscape with a certain scale under the temporal background of industrial transformation and the spatial background of organic urban renewal in existing urban industrial areas. Taking Henri Lefebvre's "space production" theory as the main theoretical vision, this research proposes a research model based on Henri Lefebvre's "Spatial Triad" theory to study urban public space in the post-industrial era. The spatial attributes of materiality, spirituality and sociality in space regeneration and the interrelationships therebetween provide a method and model reference for the design and research of urban renewal in similar areas.