When I go on one of my frequent walks through Shanghai, I often notice that many streets have changed tremendously in the last few years. The catalyst for these changes was in 2015, when the city of Shanghai launched an urban renewal plan. The objective was to improve the overall quality of the city’s public spaces.

Additionally, since 2016, some smaller, community-based renewal projects have helped to beautify many of Shanghai’s major streets. This is an important turning point for China’s urban renewal projects, which were previously under the government’s jurisdiction. But state-sponsored initiatives tended to emphasize uniformity and functionality over diversity and uniqueness. For example, officially sanctioned urban designers would build rows of stores with identically colored signs hanging above the entrances, making neighborhoods look dull and drab.

Other projects packed entire industries into small areas, creating whole streets of coffee shops and patisseries. Although many of China’s urban streets once catered to a single industry — in downtown Shanghai, for instance, Fuzhou Road brimmed with bookshops and Tongchuan Road was swimming in seafood joints — it is no longer practical to design new projects along these lines. Modern consumers do a lot of shopping online and seek a variety of brands, services, and restaurants when they venture out into the city.

Recently, though, municipal governments have begun to place a greater emphasis on the power of companies and social organizations to improve urban spaces. More and more projects take the form of public-private partnerships and invite both members of society and industry experts to participate in the design and building process.

Newer urban renewal projects have benefitted from this professionalization. Two developments on Hengshan Road in Shanghai, Hengshanfang and Dongpingli, have carved out distinctive niches for themselves following their completion last year, mixing high-end shopping with gallery spaces, and food and beverage outlets. In both areas, former colonial properties are converted into new retail spaces, preserving the appearance of old Shanghai while at the same time exuding a distinctly modern feel.

Urban designers often use other cities as a point of reference. Shanghai’s cohort commonly draws inspiration from some of Europe’s historic capitals, most of which have preserved an enviable number of picturesque, charming streets.

But inspiration can also be found in industries unrelated to urban design. I believe that more urban planners could learn a thing or two from China’s leading software companies. At present, they are the best companies in any industry in the country when it comes to managing how end users interact with their products.

Of course, software companies have certain advantages over urban designers — not least the fact that most of their work takes place in the virtual realm, which allows them to continually tweak and update their products with comparative ease. Software companies can also compose and access vast amounts of user data via their products, which allows them to easily solicit vast amounts of consumer feedback.

But urban designers can still appropriate some of the good habits of software giants. The first concerns the rapid deployment of product updates. Software companies constantly release new versions of their products in order to make up for any initial oversights. The management of public spaces should be no different: We should always seek to address the issues encountered by those who use our public spaces and our projects must be designed with the user experience in mind.

Second, urban designers and managers should aim to replicate the software industry’s use of real-time feedback. If users are having unpleasant experiences as they move through urban renewal projects, then designers should create effective mechanisms for them to immediately file complaints to which the company concerned will then respond as quickly as possible. Online consumers have become accustomed to rapid feedback mechanisms at every stage of their shopping experience and routinely communicate with real-life representatives of online outlets via internet messaging. Why aren’t more urban designers doing the same?

Rapid feedback mechanisms must be integrated into urban renewal projects, but we must also jettison much of the bureaucracy that stifles urban management. Many requests pass through convoluted administrative processes that prevent us from resolving users’ problems promptly and efficiently. This, in turn, discourages them from visiting the space again. It surprises me that many of Shanghai’s public spaces still use old-fashioned suggestion boxes to solicit users’ opinions, while our counterparts in the tech industry have long been engaging with consumers through easy-to-scan QR codes that allow users to speak on their cellphones directly with company representatives.

Third, urban designers and social entrepreneurs should study tech companies’ knack for creating a sense of community around their products. The business model of electronics and software company Xiaomi includes an online platform, Xiaomi Community, as well as offline events such as meet-and-greets in a number of cities across China. These initiatives exist alongside more commonplace business-consumer interactions in store and over the phone, a technique that has made Xiaomi’s community management projects a widely emulated model in China.

When people who share similar values and interests cluster together, they can share valuable feedback about the way products are used and where there are shortcomings. Urban designers and managers claim to forge new bonds between people and city spaces, but in China many of us fail to build relationships that last and ignore suggestions that aim to strengthen these bonds. That’s why the country’s software companies can be a model for our own professional growth and the future development of urban China — an embrace of continual learning through rapid, convenient community engagement, ensuring that we aim not only to build beautiful urban spaces, but to continuously make them better.

Translator: Lewis Wright; editors: Wu Haiyun and Matthew Walsh.