Existing cities have laid the foundations for those of the future.
Today, the real estate sector is facing major challenges that are pushing the players in the sector to renew our urban models. As the population of cities constantly grows, the challenge is to be able to respond to the needs for housing and all the associated infrastructures, whilst protecting fertile areas and limiting greenhouse gas emissions and the use of new material resources.
It is also clear that a certain proportion of Europe's commercial and industrial real estate stock is now considered to be ageing and obsolete. According to ORIE [1], the average life span of an office building is just 15 years. Meanwhile, according to the BNP Paribas Real Estate Research Department, 1,000,000 m² of additional office space was added to the rental market in Ile-de-France between Q1 2020 and Q1 2022 because of the massive deployment of remote working in companies [2].
At a time when property is increasingly rare, however, these buildings have turned out to be worthy of interest, and many of them need to be preserved. Transformation and conversion operations are being organised all over Europe, and the question of reversibility is more often addressed in project bids than it was in the past.
Download the newest edition of BuzzWords, Reconversion, Reversibility, Circular Economy: How to Build a More Sustainable City below to find out more.
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