Everyday-Use Resilience in Historic Commercial Buildings: A Review of Spatial Mechanisms, Actor Mediation, and Adaptive Outcomes

Historic commercial buildings are often described as resilient, but the mechanisms that sustain ordinary use remain fragmented across morphology, adaptive reuse, heritage governance, and community research. This Review examines how inherited spatial configurations and actor arrangements jointly shape everyday-use resilience. Using transparent, PRISMA-informed searching, screening, appraisal, and narrative/thematic synthesis, we identified 50 eligible empirical studies from 3314 records. Evidence came from 18 countries or regional settings but remained concentrated in Malaysia (9 studies), Indonesia (8), Türkiye (7), and mainland China (7); no eligible study came from the Americas, and direct African evidence was limited to one Egyptian case. In response to prescreen-sensitivity concerns, all 80 records excluded solely because the deterministic dictionary did not detect a spatial-focus term were independently reassessed; 30 were advanced beyond title/metadata review and 13 ultimately met all eligibility criteria. Four evidence-informed spatial capacities recurred: network permeability, fine-grained and reversible subdivision, climatic and service compatibility, and active public–private interfaces. These capacities did not determine resilience independently. Owners and traders translated capacity into maintenance and incremental adaptation; users sustained social legitimacy; and public, professional, financial, and digital intermediaries enabled or constrained adaptation through regulation, investment, programming, and visibility. Heritage retention was assessed in all 50 studies; use vitality was observed in 40 and assessed prospectively in 10; community benefit was observed or partly assessed in 37, prospectively in 10, and not assessed in 3. The geographically concentrated, English-language, public-API, and full-text corpus limits transferability, while the targeted validation demonstrates why deterministic terminology rules require human sensitivity checks. Everyday-use resilience is therefore presented as an evidence-informed, actor-mediated proposition concerning the conversion of inherited spatial capacity into heritage retention, use vitality, and community benefit.