*5.1. Research Perspectives*

First, future research should focus on three major topics. They should establish a definition of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse. The existing research has shown that the academic community has not yet reached a consensus on the concept of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse. The phenomenon of "misuse" and "mixed use" has recurrently emerged, leading to scattered studies on the topics, which are difficult to bring together and systematize; hence, it has been difficult to move forward in the field of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse. It is necessary for scholars to join forces to accelerate the integration of the concept of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse and promote new research in the field.

Second, the COVID-19 epidemic has caused a crisis in industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects. The negative impact of COVID-19 on the global economy has been obvious to all. Policies aiming at reducing the size of urban agglomerations have also increased the difficulty facing reconstruction and reuse projects that rely on offline activities. As a result, it has become common for most industrial heritage sites to be forced into a state of "secondary ruins". Therefore, researchers should focus on COVID-19 as a current obstacle. Researchers should apply themselves to propose feasible strategies for solving the problems brought about by COVID-19; they should consider the pandemic when evaluating the effects of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects for their studies to be more scientific and accurate. Obviously, an exploration into the relevant literature reveals that this issue has been ignored. Only a few studies have mentioned COVID-19, let alone proposed strategies to help industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects cope with the consequences of the epidemic.

Third, industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse has created a turnaround in rural revitalization. By analyzing and sorting out the relevant literature of the past five years, we found that most researchers have considered how industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse can promote urban regeneration and urban sustainable development and paid less attention to the role of these projects in promoting rural development. The conservation and reuse of rural heritage has become an important issue in global rural studies [94]. As a form of rural heritage, rural industrial heritage constitutes a unique cultural symbol of the countryside, it is particularly evident in Asian latecomer countries represented by China, Thailand, and Vietnam. It needs to be considered in research and promoted in practice.

On the other hand, future research should strengthen the application of two methods. First, comparative methods should be promoted. At present, most researchers have selected only a single reconstruction and reuse project as their case study, and they have even selected a single project in their verification and analysis when proposing a set of overall frameworks for the selection of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse strategies. The problems addressed and coping strategies proposed in these studies are targeted toward specific projects, but are often not universally applicable, which affects the value of the research. The introduction of comparative analysis principles is useful to make these studies as comprehensive and thoughtful as possible, so they include all the details of a single project and enhance the persuasiveness and feasibility of the research results.

The second approach is the dynamic research method, which is particularly useful to evaluate the effects of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects. Most researchers have used tourists' perceptions and experiences as references when evaluating the effects of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects. However, tourists represent an unstable group, as time, weather, personality and other factors affect how many tourists there are and their experiences, which in turn affect the authoritativeness and credibility of the evaluation results. The introduction of a dynamic research method requires researchers to monitor their targets for a period of time to eliminate as best they can the contingencies caused by other factors.

#### *5.2. Limitations*

First, in this paper, we addressed the global trend in the research on industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse. The literature on this topic is voluminous and complex due to the continually increasing attention paid to industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse in recent years. The literature review here may not be comprehensive, although the important studies on the topic have certainly been included to ensure that our overall results are scientifically accurate. Moreover, due to the limitation of the length of this paper, only the most representative studies (those published in key journals in the field) or the most influential studies (those highly cited) are cited. We present the authors' perspectives rather than their papers themselves; it is thus impossible for us to list the 404 studies individually in this paper. Second, we may have been mistaken in the way we read and understood studies written in different languages, as we have been unable to master these languages. Nevertheless, we have consulted experts in the relevant languages to minimize the potential bias in the way we summarized the views of other researchers. Our research has some limitations, but we have attempted to overcome them to ensure the integrity and comprehensiveness of the summary information provided and the credibility of our research conclusions.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, S.H.H. and H.Z.; methodology, S.H.H.; software, H.Z.; validation, H.Z.; formal analysis, S.H.H.; data curation, H.Z.; writing—original draft preparation, S.H.H.; writing—review and editing, H.Z. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was supported by Wuhan University (Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities "Research on Frontier Issues of Reconstruction and Reuse of Industrial Heritage in Europe and America [2017–2022], No. WHU2022-11).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** We acknowledge the reviewers for their constructive comments to improve the manuscript.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

