Adaptability evaluation of historic buildings as an approach to propose adaptive reuse strategies based on complex adaptive system theory

In the urban complex system, historic buildings can no longer focus on the original use, proposing a new reuse approach is inevitable to adapt the needs of urban development, which involves the tangible and intangible factors like spatial environment, economic policy and numerous interest groups. The paper aims to establish an evaluation method and propose the adaptive reuse strategies for historic buildings based on complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Firstly, a CAS framework of historic buildings is constructed based on the analysis based on CAS theory, which guided the evaluation factor selection by using the literature review and mutli-agent discussion. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to construct the adaptability evaluation index, and evaluation rules are determined using comprehensive evaluation method. Then, the structural equation model (SEM) is used to reveal the adaptability mechanism, thus proposing the suitable reuse strategies by adaptability category classification. Finally, 32 historic buildings are taking as evaluation samples to calculate the adaptability evaluation results. The results obtain revealed that 62.5% of the historic buildings have moderate or poor adaptability, which are mainly affected by the impacts of consciousness and the activities of multiple agents. The 32 historic buildings are divided into three categories at a proportion of 9:11:12 to propose adaptive reuse strategies. The establishment of the adaptability evaluation system can find out the main problems of historic building reuse, and provide a scientific decision-making basis for multiple agents to improve the adaptability of historic buildings in a complex urban context.