Resilient and Sustainable Industrial Site Reclamation Fuzzy AHP: A Case Study

Resilient and sustainable industrial site reclamation is a critical challenge in post-disaster recovery, particularly in contexts marked by institutional uncertainty, limited resources, and competing stakeholder priorities. Decisions on industrial relocation and redevelopment are essential for achieving balanced urban growth and efficient land use but are often constrained by conflicting socio-economic, environmental, and governance objectives. This study develops a scalable decision-support framework based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to evaluate alternative industrial site reclamation strategies under uncertainty. The framework integrates economic, environmental, social and land use criteria within a hierarchical decision structure and employs triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) together with Buckley’s geometric mean aggregation to derive priority weights from expert judgements. The framework is demonstrated using the Al-Qaboun industrial area in post-disaster Damascus. Results indicate that relocation to Adra Industrial City represents the preferred reclamation strategy. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates the stability of the prioritisation under alternative weighting scenarios, confirming the robustness of the proposed framework. The framework is transferable because its hierarchical structure can be adapted to different industrial sites by modifying evaluation criteria and stakeholder inputs while retaining the same FAHP methodology. The study provides a transparent decision-support approach for resilient industrial redevelopment and contributes to Sustainable Development Goal 11.