Objective  With a focus on grassroots social governance, participatory urban micro-renewal has shifted to community building. However, developing genuine “community consciousness” remains a challenge. The lack of suitable platforms and operational mechanisms hinders the development of grassroots governance communities. Community gardens, like co-creation groups, foster gardening activities and social interactions, and can be transformed into spaces conducive to community development. This research examines community garden planning in Dongming Subdistrict, Shanghai, and propose a path for cultivating community consciousness through participatory action.

Methods  In terms of research method, this research constructs an analytical framework of “renewal governance − participatory action − community consciousness”. Starting from the spatial dimension of urban micro-renewal, this research attempts to, through the whole-process participation of residents, strengthen residents’ cognitive cultivation, practical transformation and emotional precipitation, and promotes the formation of residents’ grassroots governance community consciousness. The overall structure is divided into three parts: action environment, action structure and action results. Firstly, this research summarizes the transformation of community gardens as the carrier of residents’ participation in space construction for grassroots governance in urban micro-renewal, and emphasizes the importance of the construction of grassroots governance community consciousness. Under the intersection of urban micro-renewal and grassroots governance community research, an analytical framework of “renewal governance − participatory action − community consciousness” is built to promote the formation of cognition. Secondly, taking the systematic participation of residents in Dongming Subdistrict in community garden and community planning as an example, this research, based on the action path of residents’ consciousness cognition before participation, practice transformation in participation and emotional feedback after participation, analyzes the formation of local residents’ community consciousness. Specifically, the research verifies the feasibility for the participatory action path to promote the formation of consciousness and explores the role of consciousness in spatial feedback through empirical cases. Finally, starting from the spatial dimension of urban micro-renewal, this research summarizes the effective action path for residents’ whole-process participation in the formation of residents’ grassroots governance community consciousness, and explains its feedback mechanism.

Results  According to the results of the survey on residents’ perception, after the intervention of participatory action, residents’ emotional cognition of the street has been improved. The Dongming community garden construction experiment (hereinafter referred to as “Dongming experiment”) guides residents to achieve “self-salvation” by participating in the construction of community gardens, enabling them to be liberated from the identity of a served “consumer” and become self-producers in public space. Meanwhile, this kind of production needs to establish a co-governance order and organization, promote larger-scale actions, achieve breakthroughs and leaps in boundaries, and then deeply influence and produce “people-oriented” community planning to form a community. Through their whole-process participation in community garden construction, the residents in Dongming Subdistrict may establish interests exchange in space construction, emotional resonance in space use, value sharing in space management and common life in space maintenance in the grassroots governance community, which presents a community consciousness system involving four community consciousnesses at different levels, namely “interest community consciousness, emotional community consciousness, value community consciousness and life community consciousness”. Finally, there is a certain probability that the four consciousnesses will fit together to form a community-block development community. The block community symbiosis plan, taking Dongming experiment as an example, is a pioneer experiment of spatial co-governance, and a social practice exploration, which proposes that block community is a growth alliance that can promote block development. The research hopes to, through the aforesaid social practice exploration, promote the research on urban renewal, urban governance, social development community and public participation.

Conclusion  In summary, aiming at the problem that it is difficult to form community consciousness in the grassroots governance of urban and rural residents, Dongming experiment studies the formation of community consciousness above space based on residents’ participatory community planning and renewal action. Specifically, the research verifies the feasibility for the participatory action path to promote the formation of consciousness and the feedback effect of consciousness on space through empirical cases, which provides a working mode reference for optimizing the people-oriented planning and design method in urban micro-renewal. Certainly, many such experiments are still in progress, whose effects entail further verification and confirmation.