Abstract. 2D shallow water equations have degenerate viscosities proportional to surface height, which vanishes in many physical considerations, say, when the initial total mass, or energy are finite. Such a degeneracy is a highly challenging obstacle for development of well-posedness theory, even local-in-time theory remains open for long time. In this paper, we will address this open problem with some new perspectives, independent of the celebrated BD-entropy [2,3]. After exploring some interesting structures of most models of 2D shallow water equations, we introduced a proper notion of solution class, called regular solutions, and identified a class of initial data with finite total mass and energy, and established the local-in-time well-posedness of this class of smooth solutions. The theory is applicable to most relatively physical shallow water models, broader than those with BD-entropy structures. Later, a Beale-Kato-Majda type blow-up criterion is also established. This paper is mainly based on our early preprint [22].