Participatory budgeting has arisen as an interesting form of citizen participation in urban development and, thus, as a new way of exercising placemaking and grassroots democracy. In this article, we ...provide an analysis of projects in Lisbon (Portugal), Valencia (Spain), and Warsaw (Poland) with a focus on three key projects concerned with improving the public realm and their contribution to enhancing the network of public open spaces. Our guiding question is: What are the potential benefits of participatory budgeting to increase green spaces and urban governance? A comparison of the three cities’ participatory budgeting programmes provides an overview of their social and political goals and the contents that provide opportunities for citizens’ participation in decision-making. The cases of Jardim do Caracol da Penha (Lisbon), the Green Street Świętokrzyska (Warsaw), and the Green Plan for the Poblats Marítims District (Valencia) pave the way for a discussion on engagement, empowerment, and connectivity with the local communities through public spaces. Using participatory budgeting as a planning and political instrument at the municipal level, as the three cases show, can be a useful way to enhance and enrich the communities’ engagement with their environments. One aspect that emerged is the communication strategies implemented in the three cases. The analysis shows that the use of media and social networks to disseminate information and gather supporters for their ideas and this growth in political influence seems to be essential for participatory budgeting. The study is backed by desk work (comprehensive understanding of the local programmes) and field work to better identify the changes in loco.
Rising the quality of life through improving existing living environments remains one of the critical tasks of contemporary urban design. The quality of life is, in part, a subjective matter and ...shall thus be approached not only through professional measures but must also include participatory inputs. The techniques for including the residents’ points of view are various and greatly depend on the broader context of each case. However, using new ICT and other digitally supported tools is an ongoing trend and can be traced in various places and stages of the process. This article addresses the issue of the participatory reading of characteristics in existing living environments as they are assessed through residents’ eyes. It reviews and analyses two case studies, a Slovenian and a Spanish one, that used the photovoice approach with photography and related supplementary materials to get to know residents’ perceptions towards cultural and natural values that enhance their quality of life. The cases illustrate two different contexts, the urban and the rural one. In both cases, the processes were supported by a digital approach to achieve broader participation in the process, to offer residents an additional channel of expression, to analyse the input data, to disseminate the results, and to encourage a wider community and stakeholder dialogue. The case studies reflect the added value of using digital support in terms of the level of the integration of residents’ voices into the placemaking process. It concludes that the photovoice supported by digital tools can importantly enhance community-oriented urban planning processes.
Although cities with World Heritage (WH) areas worldwide are socially active, specific social and cultural complexities are associated primarily with the abandonment and decay of districts. ...Contemporary habitation patterns in historic districts require technology to understand parallel realities in protected areas. This stakeholders-based approach benefits significantly from cross-referencing locative social media and open data sources. Therefore, the concepts put forward in this paper use evidence from an empirical case of WH areas in selected Spanish urban sites. The cartographic correlation of data identifies hotspots of activities and coldspots around services within each site. The results present two significant findings. The first confirms the successful implementation of a digital method to support current transitions for the historic city. The second demonstrates that social networks and open datasets can mirror contemporary social interaction in historic cities. Finally, the study calls on further investigating Artificial Intelligence-based assessments for the future of WH areas.
As machine learning becomes more widely used in policy and environmental impact settings, concerns about accuracy and fairness arise. These concerns have piqued the interest of researchers, who have ...advanced new approaches and theoretical insights to enhance data gathering, treatment and models’ training. Nonetheless, few works have looked at the trade-offs between appropriateness and accuracy in indicator evaluation to comprehend how these constraints and approaches may better redound into policymaking and have a more significant impact across culture and sustainability matters for urban governance. This empirical study fulfils this void by researching indicators’ accuracy and utilizing algorithmic models to test the benefits of large text-based analysis. Here we describe applied work in which we find affinity and occurrence in indicators trade-offs that result be significant in practice to evaluate large texts. In the study, objectivity and fairness are kept substantially without sacrificing accuracy, explicitly focusing on improving the processing of indicators to be truthfully assessed. This observation is robust when cross-referring indicators and unique words. The empirical results advance a novel form of large text analysis through machine intelligence and refute a widely held belief that artificial intelligence text processing necessitates either accepting a significant reduction in accuracy or fairness.
Cultural landscapes can host natural and cultural areas. However, often, this distinction is not clear cut and the attempts to clarify this blur the character of landscapes. Vernacular landscapes ...today act as a living legacy, subject to transformation, preservation, or abandonment. This study analyses these legacies in order to evaluate elements and interactions. The research uses GIS with spatial and thematic databases of cultural heritage and natural habitats, as well as open data, historical cartography, citizen participation, and fieldwork information sources. In combination with GIS tools, LiDAR images helped in the dataset evaluation process. A priority scale of conservation for different areas was outlined through a process cataloguing the natural and cultural assets with conservation and intervention rubrics. These settings are classified according to their cultural and natural value, conservation, surrounding environment, and potential threats. The experimental methodology of this study aims to add new options for characterising vernacular landscapes by adding soft participatory values to datasets. These prove to be reliable complementary information, improving accuracy.
This paper theoretically examines the extent to which visual perception has excluded alternative forms of culture in World Heritage cities and towns in Spain. To do so, an initial review is carried ...out of the UNESCO framework and criteria which establishes the outstanding universal value of Spanish cities and towns. This is followed by a review of minor concepts such as informality and creativity, which are related to alternative conceptions of culture and heritage. Thirdly, a review of the literature provides an overview of the appraisal of the social value in the heritage realm. This is achieved through the Historic Urban Landscape approach, which is adapted to specific forms of local appraisal. An analysis of policy helps explain the need to review principles of protection in terms of ethical evaluations. The analysis shows that outdated policies clash with contemporary assessment and participatory methods of heritage-making.
Heritage tourism bases its definition on searching for different, authentic, and somewhat unexplored places. Recent literature speaks of the growth of new forms of tourism based on the tradition that ...seeks to surprise visitors with popular culture, traditional activities, or actions that bring traditional culture closer to tourists. However, the reality is that the influx of tourists to small mountain villages is marked by the most “monumental” historical and architectural values, leaving aside some other minor attributes. This article uses the historical centres of rural villages to place inhabitants’ knowledge at the centre of tourism initiatives. The aim of the study was to develop cohesive and inclusive tourism activities in historic centres by analysing the built environment’s attributes and values. A participatory methodology marks the cultural change to enhance collaboration through transparent and ethical foundations and respect these places’ distinctive character. The study of values helped to conduct an in-depth analysis of local realities to document and map historical centres’ tangible attributes through crafts, traditional culture, and local heritage forms.
This paper examines how contemporary on-going and lively debate on Critical Heritage Studies merges with previous discourses on World Heritage Cultural Landscapes and rural societies. The scholarly ...approach to authenticity and integrity, and the critical point of static and dynamic approaches to these terms allow the author to challenge previous World Heritage (WH) discourses with a view to obtaining innovative insight into abandoned vernacular landscapes. Two main arguments are thus developed in this study. The first of these is an overview of the dynamics of abandoned cultural landscapes on an international scale. The second is an inside view aiming to provide an accurate interpretation of how these landscapes should be scrutinised and understood. To do this, autotopias and heterotopias broach the fundamental issue of how the Outstanding Universal Value of attributes in abandoned cultural landscapes needs to be understood, enhanced, experienced, and managed in an innovative WH approach. In conclusion, complex proposals for these heritage landscapes should rely on understanding the dynamics of the material and the social construct of the habitats they contain in order to assess them effectively from the standpoint of a World Heritage Cultural Process Assemblage rather than that of Outstanding Material Stratification.
Historic environments represent the evolution of materials and techniques that have been used for the construction these environments over the centuries. Entering into the study of this field entails ...working not only on the crafts that have constructed these environments but also on the people who made, used, and reinterpreted them by learning about the craftsmen and the idiosyncrasies of the place. The study has adopted several methodologies as reference to examine the material and cultural reality of the rural region of Valencia, Spain. Through the adaptation of international methodologies, researchers have carried out a digital database that compiles and maps out the results of the Local Character Assessment of ten Histotiric Urban Cores by incorporating the historical, architectural, and social values to reinforce the Territorial Heritage Action Plan. One of the critical innovations adopted by this form of assessment is the compulsory integration of tangible and intangible heritage through the active involvement of users and makers. Another innovation is to understand the values behind the dynamism and transformation of historic sites. Hence, this study advances theory and practice on the transmission of knowledge among artisans, researchers, and the population and how contemporary practices help acquire new meanings that overlap the past ones.
PDF
