Adaptive reuse as a strategy toward urban resilience

Abstract

The significance of urban development has been realized again while acute shocks and chronic stresses (earthquake or unemployment) affect cities in a negative way. Therefore, urban resilience becomes more important for economic, environmental, and social sustainability of the built environment. There is a wide range of approaches to resilience in the literature such as ecological, engineering, and adaptive systems. Unlike others, adaptive resilience establishes a co-evolutionary interaction between actors (existing building) and the system (external effects) that leads to a continual process on their adjustment. In relation to cities, built environment is also under a constant change. As the advent of new technology has changed buildings' use, some of them have faced obsolescence in physical, economic, functional, technological, social, legal, and political ways. The importance of time-based design over form-based design thinking has come to the fore. However, existing obsolete buildings could gain new functions and contribute to urban resilience and sustainability through adaptive reuse method. The purpose of this study is to provide assessment criteria for existing buildings' adaptive reuse potential in the context of resilient cities. Thus, the research incorporates Holling's resilience cycle (1986) and Schmidt III et. al's building layers and time concept (2009) for resilient adaptive reuse strategies.