In medium-sized cities and large metropolitan areas, cultural institutions – such as Universities, Foundations, Museums, and so on – are important players because of cultural-educational activities they offer, of urban places they occupy, and of local, national, and international inhabitants they attract through their multiple functions. On the one hand, they are kinds of 'big magnets' able to involve daily a multitude of individuals, such as students, researchers, visitors, or workers, belonging to different generations and coming from different contexts. These cultural institutions can interact with the urban contexts they are inserted in, producing positive externalities (new permanent or temporary residents, disused or underused places regeneration, job opportunities, etc.) or negative ones (traffic jam, land value increase, inhabitants' competitions, social exclusion, etc.). On the other hand, they can stimulate new cultural, symbolic, and green practices for the inhabitants' everyday life, generating social and territorial innovation. Indeed, they can become drivers of new sustainable approaches on urban regeneration and real estate, contributing to sensibilize Institutions, stockholders, and inhabitants on new green and sustainable habits and practices. Therefore, they can influence the integrated social, economic, and environmental dynamics within each local neighbourhood as well as within many other national and international connected urban and rural places, strongly conditioning their identity and ‘metabolisms' and inducing both innovation in the inhabitants' sustainable cultural and functional practices and big impacts on real estate development. The session concerns theoretical and methodological reflections as well as applicative case studies on urban regeneration processes driven by cultural institutions. Through a multidisciplinary approach and a multiscale perspective, it focuses the different functional and symbolic roles of cultural institutions in urban innovation as well as their driving role in network creation with other institutional, private, and associative urban players in order to generate sustainable approaches on real estate development and regeneration. Therefore, colleagues from different disciplinary fields and international contexts are invited to participate proposing theoretical and methodological approaches or applicative case studies on specific European or global urban contexts.