Analytic hierarchy process in decision making of heritage reuse: Sursock pasha

Egyptian heritage is undeniably rich and largely diversified. This heritage is a witness of ancient civilizations and transfer its tremendous values, collective wisdom and memory of the people in the past, which should be documented, interpreted, and conserved for the public. The conservation of traditional residential architecture buildings is crucial in terms of sociocultural continuity. When they are no longer used for residential purpose, new functions should be assigned to them for the continuity of the heritage buildings. The process of selection of new buildings needs to consider different criteria in order to reach the optimum selection. This paper aims to present a suitable evaluation method to figure out the optimum solution using an integrated multi criteria decision making method. The most suitable tool is the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) that was developed by Thomas Saaty in 1970s. The selected software for this paper is Microsoft Excel. Sursock Pasha palace is selected as a case study. There are four suggested alternatives: hotel, museum, office building and mixed use. After using the AHP application, it was concluded that office building is the best choice with the highest value of 0.29 followed by mixed use building, museum, and hotel. © 2020, Cairo University. All rights reserved.