THE old Kingway brewery in Luohu District will soon be built into a base of jewelry, trade, fashion and cultural creative industries, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported Wednesday.

    Kingway is a local beer brand and its brewery has been in use since the 1990s.

    The Kingway Corp. applied to join a municipal urban regeneration plan at the end of 2012. The reconstruction of the old brewery is part of an urban renewal push.

    Architects have inspected the site and come up with a plan to upgrade the area while preserving the industrial heritage.

    According to the report, to preserve the heritage of the site, the renovation project will turn the brewery’s storage house into a jewelry museum and a courtyard. A museum about beer culture will also be constructed.

    The manufacturing equipment will be preserved and made into statues to decorate the public space, which will become government property.

    To encourage the protection and renovation of remaining industrial sites, the city’s urban planning and land resources commission has allocated additional space of a total floor area of 13,900 square meters to the project.

    By November this year, Shenzhen had approved 75 urban renewal projects with an investment of 40.2 billion yuan (US$6.19 billion) by October. Investment in renovation projects is expected to break 50 billion yuan this year.

    The renovation of a Dapeng New Area factory is a success story in Shenzhen’s efforts at urban renewal. The factory was built in 1989 and shut down in 2003. It was recently renovated and renamed iDTown. It now hosts public events, including art shows and music performances. (Zhang Qian)