Dr. Emmanuel CRIVAT, Urban Planning Expert, A-Z Engineering, Paris, Délègue Général de Acousti@rc Association

The Concept ImmoDurabilit€

Real-estate sustainability is a temporal concept: the insertion of “the real-estate object” in time, in a sustainable way.

If one considers this description as a definition of the building sustainability that underlies the transformation of space, of its usage, one can work out a relevant mechanism for the social being’s permanent preoccupations to come close to nature: the production of values, of signification. It seems to be evident enough that the interest of such an approach to “the world of public works and buildings” is prospective, and it allows for the organization and instrumentation of a series of indices situated in the extended present-time of the project and “blinking” throughout the process of consumption specific to the city, the region, the world and the universe at large. Sustainable development and environment quality would reveal themselves as sub-products of a global and visionary thinking in the universal city, whereas mondialisation is only a stage.

The actant structure of the art of building is universal: “The architect” designs what the “customer” wishes and “the enterpriser” can build. Practically speaking, this elementary simplicity manifests itself only in traditional societies. In our “over-codified” society “the real-estate object” turns into an exchange object even before its creation; it pass es through the hands of various “actors” who make its insertion in time into a sustainable, necessary, implicit, even compulsory process that is difficult to describe.

It is a vast subject that deserves being dealt with in a few doctorate dissertations. An example of remarkable import deriving from the externalization of the real-estate management and of the services based on the stipulations of