Flexibility in housing design, as a key component in responding to the changing needs of residents, has received increasing attention from researchers and designers in recent decades. However, assessing this concept remains challenging due to the diversity of definitions, the dispersion of evaluation indicators, the time-consuming nature of assessment processes, and reliance on human analysis. The absence of a coherent framework for measuring housing flexibility, along with the inability of existing assessment methods to comprehensively address its multidimensional nature, highlights the need for further investigation. This article aims to identify the approaches, methods, indicators, and tools used for assessing flexibility in order to provide a comprehensive overview of current knowledge in this field. Accordingly, the main research question focuses on identifying the definitions and fundamental concepts of flexibility, the indicators and tools employed for its assessment, and the emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence in this domain.

This study adopts a qualitative approach and employs a narrative-analytical literature review method based on searches conducted in the Scopus, Web of Science, and SID databases. Using the keywords “housing flexibility,” “building adaptability,” and “flexibility assessment” for the period from 2000 to 2025, 157 initial sources were identified. After applying three selection criteria—direct relevance to flexibility in housing design, the presence of a specific evaluation method, and publication in reputable scientific journals—36 sources were selected for final analysis.

The findings indicate that housing flexibility assessment methods can be classified into three main categories: quantitative approaches, qualitative approaches, and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, the examination of emerging technological capabilities demonstrates that computer vision can facilitate the automatic recognition of spatial patterns and housing plan configurations, large language models can support qualitative data analysis and the interpretation of residents’ feedback, and parametric analysis can enable the simulation of multiple scenarios of physical transformation. Collectively, these technologies are proposed as complementary tools to enhance traditional approaches to assessing housing flexibility.