The Criteria for Decision Making in Adaptive Reuse Towards Sustainable Development

Abstract

Adaptive reuse is an important strategy for achieving sustainability as it ensures a continuous building life cycle and prevents building destruction. Adaptive reuse has the greatest potential to lower the environmental load of the built environment significantly within the next 20 to 30 years. But, the owners and practitioners still lack of point of references to justify and evaluate their decision making with regard to the adaptation practice. The aim of this paper is to explore the unique criteria of decision making among practitioners in the application of adaptive reuse of existing buildings. The descriptive study has identified five main criteria influenced in decision making in adaptive reuse that effected to the sustainable development; economic, environment, social, legislative and architecture. We designed a questionnaire to determine the most significant criteria in decision making for adaptive reuse towards sustainable development among practitioners. The paper describes the process in identifying the unique criteria and the proposed methodology for the study.