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Within the next 20–30 years, adaptive reuse will have the greatest potential to reduce the built environment's environmental impact. Despite this, stakeholders still do not have sufficient points of reference in justifying and evaluating their adaptation practice decisions. The decision to reuse a building involves a complex set of considerations, including economic, social, environmental, legislative and architectural issues. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unique decision-making criteria among stakeholders when considering adaptive reuse of an existing building asset in Malaysian heritage cities.

Thirty (30) unique criteria of decision-making were identified through a detailed literature review. The quantitative method of a self-completion questionnaire survey was conducted among stakeholders, including architects, valuers, planners, government department, developers and building owners. There were asked about their opinion and view on the criteria that could have influenced the decision-making in considering the adaptive reuse of the existing buildings in two heritage cities in the states of Penang and Malacca, Malaysia. Thus, it is the aim of this paper to evaluate and reveal the key criteria pertaining to this.

The analysis shows that there are seven key criteria that influence the decision-making of adaptive reuse of existing building: building value; building suitability; structural condition; official plan and zoning; building code; client requirement and heritage designated. In this regard, while “building value” factors were the key determinants in deciding whether to reuse or demolish, the asset’s suitability and structural condition, as well as rules, were also taken into account. Additionally, the environmental, economic and social tenets of sustainability were also identified as important, but were given less weight in matters concerning reuse. And due to the fact that many of the existing buildings are rapidly becoming obsolete, they are now increasingly being prioritized during the adaptive reuse decision-making process to ensure long-term outcomes.

The research is limited owing to the difficulty in obtaining accurate information concerning the number of decision agents who have been involved in the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. Thus, the respondents in this research were randomly selected. Due to this limitation, the result does not encompass the whole Malaysia, only the stakeholders in Penang and Malacca have been selected the respondents in this study as these states are listed in the UNESCO World Heritage.

When deciding whether to reuse or demolish an existing building, the proposed criteria will outline the crucial areas that must be examined by owners, developers and key project stakeholders. It can also be used to assess the financial, physical and social aspects of a cultural project.

This paper adds to the body of knowledge concerning decision-making criteria for adaptive reuse strategies in achieving heritage city sustainability.

The current study evaluates the success of this project at the local scale by examining the degree of compliance with local sustainability indicators after the revival of the Zanjan Match Factory. Hence, the purpose of this article is to evaluate the prosperity of the Zanjan match factory monument restoration project in achieving local sustainability. The study intention of prosperity implies any action, achievement or positive outcome that contributes to informed decision-making and leads to sustainable neighborhood development.

The current research is applied research in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical, and survey-field in terms of method. The criteria evaluated in this research include criteria as follows: (1) evaluation of protection and preservation of the building, (2) success of the new function and (3) sustainable local development, which are defined items for each criterion. The questions of the questionnaire are prepared according to the Likert 5 points spectrum, the value of which is answered between 1 and 5 and the hierarchy goes from “very good” to “very poor”. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient obtained for the validity of the questionnaire questions is 0.85, which indicates the appropriate validity of the questionnaire questions.

The study findings indicate that the applied criteria are at an acceptable level since the criterion of sustainable local development and architecture have obtained the scores of 4 and the new function criterion scores of 3. Field surveys and observations of changes made in the neighborhood including the construction of a thoroughfare, commercial complex, service complex and local parks verify the validity of the findings. The results of the proposed study indicate that adaptive reuse projects should not be taken into account as individual projects since an individual building can be a catalyst for the restoration of other buildings and contribute to the transformation of the whole area by affecting the surrounding environment.

Adaptive reuse of building assets is an important approach to sustainability that can be utilized in conserving and preserving industrial heritage buildings was described in this paper. An adaptive reuse project follows three aims of cultural and historical heritage conservation, the success of the new performance and the development of local communities and a successful project appropriately balances these three goals.