The ESPI International Real Estate Conference (ESPI-IREC) is a bi-annual event run by ESPI2R. The 2024 event will be hosted in the core of Paris at rue Saint-Honoré, almost at the Louvre’s doors. The conference is to take place on site, without any online contribution nor live broadcast. The conference has grown into a premier platform for real estate researchers and experts from various disciplines such as – law, economics, management, finance, urban planning, architecture, and sociology – to engage in dialogue and to intertwine insights. Its primary aspiration is to nurture discussions on real estate transformations and mutations at all scales – global, regional, national and local – with a specific focus on the socio-territorial dynamics of housing and commerce premises, real estate markets and investors, and on issues revolving around property assets: its administration, management and use. In the scope of this conference, SUSTHERIT research project was presented.

The 11th study day of the ESPI Research in Real Estate (ESPI2r) laboratory offers the opportunity to exchange views between practitioners and researchers on an international scale. It initiates the discussion around several questions: what legal, technical and financial tools does the public authorities have at their disposal to support or even encourage the rehabilitation of the heritage inscribed by UNESCO? Which private actors are committed to this path? Who are the actors involved in the rehabilitation of the built heritage and what are their driving forces? Is the climate emergency a factor in accelerating rehabilitation or does it constitute a danger to the maintenance of old built heritage? Demolishing or renovating, safeguarding or renewing, what are the economic, social and heritage issues on which these trade-offs are based?

SRI2025 spotlighted Pathways to Sustainability Solutions, sharing implementation strategies and legacies of successful approaches to critical sustainability concerns facing Chicago, the United States, and the globe. It also provided opportunities to overcome engagement, policy, resourcing, and other hurdles that slow our transformation to more resilient and equitable futures.

Over the last decade, historic housing has become the subject of investment by real estate developers, service companies and individual owners alike, resulting in a substantially modified function of this housing stock. The actions also disrupted the traditional configuration around local preservation policy by bringing new, often hard to control actors into the decision-making process of heritage preservation. A particular difficulty is presented in CEE cities, where the super-ownership tenure structure gives even less leeway for authorities. As a result, boundaries between the cultural, the political, and the market have become blurred, requiring critical attention to preservation and heritage constructs (Hafstein, 2012: 503) especially around ordinary historic objects, also reorienting their tangible and intangible significance.

In this context a proper assessment of these transformation and their outcomes is needed to balance private and public interest but also to see clearly the diverse economic and socio-cultural objectives. While issues of preservation and transformation of historic urban cores have been investigated and debated (Smith, 1998; McCabe, 2018), private actors´ intervention in historic housing stock, more specifically in ordinary historic housing objects, raise new questions around object selection, demolition and preservation processes.

Looking at historic residential buildings as “ordinary” heritage objects adheres to a heritage discourse that considers elements significant even when they are neither recognised by governments nor listed on official heritage registers but are considered significant or culturally meaningful by individuals, communities, and collectives for the ways in which they constitute themselves and operate in the present (Harrison, 2010). Taking this approach as a point of departure this session invites empirical and theoretical contributions that deal with these questions and issues. It is particularly interested in submissions dealing with new heritage expressions, place identity, social and technical innovations/responses, spatial transformation in the context of investments into the housing stock.