Objective Industrial historical spaces, as core cultural carriers in old industrial cities, preserve industrial civilization’s material traces and workers’ collective memory. Along with the acceleration of urban renewal and industrial transformation in the whole world, traditional industrial cities have faced serious challenges. Nevertheless, against the backdrop of cultural tourism integration and production innovation, they are facing interferences, including the homogeneity of business modes and the quick loss of the historical environment. Current research has three deficiencies: 1) Overemphasis on physical heritage, neglecting the emotional link and mass participation; 2) Lack of analysis on governance type, failing to connect governance roles and their internal resource allocation logics to resilience balance; 3) Relies on engineering or ecological resilience, ignoring the socio-emotional resilience that is for multi-system coordination and human-centered sustainability. This research aims to: 1) Construct a “heritage-emotion-participation” three-dimensional resilience evaluation system to break single-dimensional limits by incorporating psychological attachments and social interactions; 2) Carry out classification on Shenyang’s industrial historical spaces into government-led, government-enterprise cooperative, and enterprise-led categories, conduct exploration on the correlations between governance and resilience; 3) Through empirical method measure the resilience of 15 research sites for the purpose of identifying type-specific characteristics and structural contradictions; 4) Put forward strategies with clear goals, which can enrich theory and assist old industrial cities in the work of heritage protection and cultural inheritance.

Methods The “heritage-emotion-participation” three-dimensional resilience evaluation system is divided into three parts: heritage resilience, emotional resilience, and participation resilience. This framework surpasses traditional physical preservation methods by considering industrial historical space as a dynamic, multi-participant system mutual and reciprocal influences. Twenty-two index items were ultimately identified by reviewing existing documents and soliciting opinions from eight specialists. This research places focus on commercial development, rainwater logging, and population structure, and 8 indicators got from field surveys are used as external disturbance pressures. We have integrated the (analytical hierarchy process, AHP) method with the entropy weight method, so that we can avoid bias and, therefore, ensure scientific rigor when indicator importance is being determined. The present research contained 825 questionnaires (97.7% validity, 806 valid) which target sightseeing people, management workers, and local people. Besides, this study also includes publicly available data (Shenyang Statistical Yearbook) and on-site work for disturbance measurement indexes. This multi-source data gathering method has effectively bridged the gap between top-down system structures constructed by the government and bottom-up views held by community members. Reliability and validity tests show the credibility (Cronbach’s α=0.854, KMO=0.822, Bartlett’s p<0.001). Finally, this research converts the calculation results into values that lie between 0 and 1, to reflect the system’s relative extra ability that withstands external pressures. These results are then divided into five grades on the basis of the intensity of this capability.

Results The I_\mathrmCR,i values for the 15 sites in Shenyang range from 0.51 to 0.68, overall medium-high resilience (7 “relatively strong”, 8 “medium”). The subsystems are unbalanced and exhibit prominent structural disparities: 1) Heritage Resilience: 0.03−0.67 (avg 0.22). The material protection outpaced humanistic experience, indicating a reliance on static physical conservation rather than dynamic spatial activation; 2) Emotional Resilience: 0.09−0.64 (avg 0.21). The macro recognition fails to become emotional attachment, revealing a profound lack of micro-level, individual narratives and immersive scenarios; 3) Participation resilience: 0.05−0.66 (avg 0.16, lowest). The participation was passive, not long-term, exposing a critical bottleneck in transforming short-term tourist behavior into sustainable community co-creation.

Conclusion Key research results: 1) The industrial historical spaces of Shenyang possess medium-high resilience, with participation resilience being the bottleneck that restrains the system’s equilibrium; 2) The types of governance shape resilience through different operation logics; 3) The interactions between governance and resilience indicate a need for strategies that are specific to types and oriented towards targets. Theoretically, it enriches the resilience theory of industrial historical spaces through the combination of socio-emotional resilience and governance, thus shifting the attention of academic circles from physical vulnerability evaluations to multi-actor, synergy-based mechanisms. In practice, the strategies contain: 1) Government-led: Set up a multi-layer public joining mechanism and deepen the building of an emotional connection carrier; 2) Cooperative: Restrict business forms and bring enterprise culture into operation activities for reducing capital interferences; 3) Enterprise-led: Establish funds for heritage protection and develop immersion-type experiences, for the prevention of the loss of authenticity. These contents give support to Shenyang and other post-industrial cities that are similar to it in the sustainable passing on of industrial historical space, and therefore provide a dependable model example for current urban risk governance management.