Evolutionary Game Analysis on Improving Collaboration in Sustainable Urban Regeneration: A Multiple-Stakeholder Perspective

Urban regeneration is a naturally controversial societal issue, which has a significant impact on people’s daily life. The main stakeholders, including the government, developers, and residents, expect the best out of urban regeneration. Occasionally, the interest of various stakeholders clashes with each other, which considerably hampers the success of the project. To improve the overall output and achieve sustainability in urban regeneration, we adopted a three-population evolutionary game framework in analyzing the problem. First, we analyzed the interest of stakeholders and formulated the payoffs of three stakeholders. A total of 13 evolutionarily stable strategies were found on the basis of the replicator dynamic equations and Jacobian matrices of each stakeholder. Second, we conducted robustness checks, which enabled us to determine that subsidies from the government have the most comprehensive influence on the equilibrium of the game by affecting players’ attitudes of cooperativeness. Finally, we proposed an adaptive subsidy scheme to stimulate the cooperative behaviors of developers and residents and alleviate the excessive financial burden of the government. The game outcomes were validated through a case study of an urban regeneration project in Shanghai. This study provides a novel perspective to handle strategic decision-making problems in urban regeneration and other policy-related societal issues.