Large housing estates or how to reconcile refurbishment and heritagisation?

We propose to examine the relations between the schemes of recognition of large housing estates architecture and the operational practices of their refurbishment. Large housing estates, special types of housing, created to overcome post-war housing shortage, were conceived as urban compositions. Their dual specificity resides in the fact that they form a whole and not a juxtaposition of individual elements, and that they are still inhabited. How to integrate these specific features into their recognition? How to reconcile heritagisation and refurbishment of these large housing estates, two approaches which seem to be mutually exclusive ? To what extent does this heritage, which is struggling to obtain a consensus, lead us to consider other alternative heritagisation processes ? Two assumptions have emerged. The heritagisation of large housing estates would entail (1) overcoming the dichotomy between institutional heritagisation and heritagisation by appropriation of the inhabitants, (2) including the project into the heritagisation process. Starting from a transversal view on three legal arrangements, the "site patrimonial remarquable", Remarkable heritage site of Firminy-Vert (France), the Site plan and the pilot study of Le Lignon city (Switzerland) and the Masterplan of the Cite Modele (Belgium), we show three different ways of reconciling heritagisation and refurbishment, as well as doorways to an alternative heritagisation of large housing estates.