This chapter examines creative preservation as a practice that sustains habitability—the conditions that allow people and communities to live meaningful, healthy, and dignified lives in place. Habitability involves more than material provision; it also depends on lived experience, social structures, power relations, and wider system links. Against the backdrop of intertwined socio-ecological crises and extractive growth logics, we explore how creative preservation works with what already exists—through repair, reuse, bricolage, low-tech practices, and craft—to extend the life of materials, practices, and relations. Rather than freezing the past, it keeps places adaptable, maintaining continuity while accommodating change and difference. We develop this argument through a field study of La Station—Gare des Mines in Paris, a former coal station transformed into a cultural and community space. Initiatives such as La Bricole (upcycling and bricolage), Coucou Crew (support for young refugees and asylum seekers), and a community garden show how habitability can be composed across divergent needs and values. The site illustrates how tensions are worked with rather than erased, and how practices aligned with a ‘meritocracy of preservation’ can counter narrowly production-driven logics. In doing so, the chapter offers a complementary development of transformational wisdom: from wisdom as knowledge application to wisdom as the ongoing care of shared environments, where multiple ways of inhabiting can persist without foreclosing others’ possibilities.