Characterisation of Adaptive Reuse Stakeholders and the Effectiveness of Collaborative Rationality Towards Building Resilient Urban Areas

Abstract

In an adaptive reuse decision-making setting, there is usually an occurrence of conflicting beliefs, opinions, interests, and resources among relevant stakeholders. Knowing who these stakeholders are and why, through a collaborative approach, will allow stakeholders with diverse interests regarding adaptive reuse to come together and participate either directly or indirectly in any stage of the decision-making process. This paper examines the usefulness of collaborative rationality among stakeholders involved in an adaptive reuse decision-making process. The specific objectives include: to characterise the stakeholders involved in an adaptive reuse decision-making process; and; investigate how their collaborative rationality can be effectively integrated into the adaptive reuse decision-making process. After a review of existing literature, four typical categories of stakeholders involved in an adaptive reuse decision-making process were identified: i) investors; ii) producers; iii) regulators; and iv) users. Also, the effectiveness of collaboration among the diverse stakeholders of an adaptive reuse decision-making process was validated using a focus group workshop to incorporate transparency, common goal, ideal speech, and consistency into the process. These findings imply that the active collaboration among characterised adaptive reuse stakeholders is important to mitigate the risk of manipulation of an adaptive reuse decision-making process, and, for policy makers to understand better the expectations and needs of the public, thereby, enhancing consents for optimal adaptive reuse decisions.