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.