- Dore M, Fredholm S, Brorström S. “Strategic Responses to Wicked Problems of Heritage Management: Experiences from the West Link Infrastructure Project in Gothenburg, Sweden”. In Land, published 1 October 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10101032
Heritage management in infrastructure planning is in this paper regarded as a ‘wicked problem’—A multidimensional and unpredictable activity infused with conflicting stakeholder perspectives. By focusing on the West Link and drawing on theoretical notions of strategy-as-practice, the aim is to identify the circumstances in which paradoxes and dilemmas of wicked problems emerge and examine the professional micro-level strategizing applied to navigate and overcome them. The railway construction was deemed to be a threat to the 17th century fortifications, historical parks and former agricultural properties, today located in the city center. The Swedish government appointed representatives from the Swedish Transport Administration and heritage professionals from national, regional and local levels of government to negotiate how best to deal with these challenges. By means of primary data from interviews and workshops with stakeholders, and document- and correspondence analysis, the results showed how three main challenges hampered a fruitful dialogue and outcome: the inherent complexity of the task, different approaches to heritage and lack of adequate coordination within and between the parties. Strategic responses included action plans, delegation of tasks in reference and working groups, the signing of agreements, reorganization and financing of additional personnel. We discuss the main factors underlining the wickedness of heritage management in infrastructure planning as both processual and collaborative, and the implications of this for practice regarding bringing about more operative and sustainable approaches.
- Bai N, Nourian P, Luo R, Pereira Roders A. “What is OUV” Revisited: A Computational Interpretation on the Statements of Outstanding Universal Value. In ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (CIPA 2021). 2021. Accepted.
The Statements of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) concerns the core justification for nominating and inscribing cultural and natural heritage properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, ever since 2007. Ten criteria are specified and measured independently for the selection process. The 2008 ICOMOS Report “What is OUV” has been a successful example to interpret OUV as an integral concept by inspecting the associations of the selection criteria in all inscribed properties. This paper presents a novel methodology for interpreting OUV using computational techniques of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Graph Visualization. The study shows that the selection criteria are consistently associated with each other in different similarity metrics. It provides a quantitative and qualitative interpretation of the Statements of OUV and the associations of selection criteria with a lexicon and similarity graphs, which can be seen as an elaborated computational extension of the 2008 Report, useful for future inscription and evaluation processes of World Heritage nominations.
- Bai N, Nourian P, Pereira Roders A. Global Citizens and World Heritage: Social Inclusion of Online Communities in Heritage Planning. In The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (CIPA 2021). 2021. Accepted.
Social inclusion has grown as an important goal for heritage planning over the past decades. Whilst the document Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape called a decade ago for novel tools for civic engagement and knowledge documentation, social media already functions as a platform for online communities to actively get involved in heritage-related events and campaigns activities by sharing their ideas. Especially when radical events occur around heritage properties, either positive or negative, emotions and opinions would spread rapidly across the globe via the internet to reach online communities of interested or concerned citizens. This paper presents a theoretical framework defined to classify social inclusion of online communities in heritage planning processes through differentiating the everyday baseline scenarios from the event-triggered activated ones. This framework is the first step on future research to investigate the different focal attention points, mechanisms, and patterns of social inclusion of online communities in heritage planning, towards transforming it to a more socially inclusive practice. See also the talks on Symposium on Future Landscape and the presentation at Our World Heritage Globinar2.0 on the Transformational Impact of Information Technology.
- Bai N, Luo R, Nourian P, Pereira Roders, A. WHOSe Heritage: Classification of UNESCO World Heritage” Outstanding Universal Value” Documents with Smoothed Labels. arXiv preprintarXiv:2104.05547. 2021.
The UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) is to identify the exceptionally valuable cultural and natural heritage to be preserved for mankind as a whole. Evaluating and justifying the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of each nomination in WHL is essentially important for a property to be inscribed, and yet a complex task even for experts since the criteria are not mutually exclusive. A tool to check the accuracy, objectivity, consistency, and coherence of such statements can significantly benefit the inscription process involving thousands of experts worldwide each year. This study applies state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing models to build a classifier on OUV justification statements, seeking an explainable and scalable automation tool to aid the nomination, evaluation, and monitoring processes of World Heritage properties. The study shows that the best models can reach 94.3% top-3 accuracy, which is promising to be further developed and applied in heritage research and practice. This tool functions effectively as a machine replica of the collective authoritarian view from all the existing OUV statements, which could facilitate the mining of heritage-values-related texts from multiple data sources (e.g., social media).
- Bai N, Azadi S, Nourian P, Pereira Roders A. Decision-Making as a Social Choice Game: Gamifying an urban redevelopment process in search for consensus. In Anthropologic – Architecture and Fabrication in the cognitive age – Proceedings of the 38th eCAADe. Vol. 2. 2020. p. 555-564
This paper reports the formulation, the design, and the results of a serious game developed for structuring negotiations concerning the redevelopment of a university campus with various stakeholders. Ten stakeholders were fictitiously set up with their actions and preferences on different development scenarios. Through a simulation gaming workshop during the Heriland Masterclass of Democratization in TU Delft, two of three groups of participants reached consensus successfully through different levels of democratic participation and discussion. This paper provides full mathematical formulation and analyses the outcomes of this workshop.
- Bai N, Nourian P, Xie A, Roders AP. Towards a finer heritage management: Evaluating the tourism carrying capacity using an agent-based model. In RE: Anthropocene, Design in the Age of Humans – Proceedings of the 25th CAADRIA. Vol. 1. 2020. p. 305-314
As one of the most important areas in the Palace Museum, Beijing, China, the Hall of Mental Cultivation (养心殿) had suffered from overcrowding of visitors before it was closed in 2016 for conservation. Preparing for the reopening in 2020, the Palace Museum decided to take the chance and initiate finer-grained tourism management in the Hall. This research intends to provide an audio-guided touring program by dynamically evaluating the Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC) with the highlight spots in the Hall, to operate the touring program spatiotemporally. Framing an optimization problem for the touring program, an agent-based simulator, Thunderhead Pathfinder, originally developed for evacuation in the emergency, is utilized to verify the performance of the touring system. The simulation shows that the proposed touring program could precisely fit all the key requirements to improve the visitors’ experience, to guarantee heritage safety, and to ensure more efficient management. See also the Heriland Blog: A paradigm shift of tourism carrying capacity – Towards a finer tourist management in World Heritage Properties.
- Arbara, S. & D’Autilia, R. (2021). “A population game model for the expansion of Airbnb in the city of Venice.” Sustainability 13.7: 3829. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13073829
The emergence of Airbnb along with an increase in urban tourism has intensified the pressure on urban areas while adding a new dimension to the dynamics of housing distribution, especially in historic cities. These dynamics affect local economies and significantly alter the characteristics of urban spaces, hence the necessity to not only create policies that foster sustainable tourism development but also to advance urban models that explore the relation between Airbnb and the traditional rental and accommodation sector. Through the case of Venice, the present study sheds light on the potential evolution of Airbnb housing in comparison to the traditional rental and homeowner market. In particular, we sought to understand whether a potential equilibrium between these uses exists and if so, at which point in regard to this equilibrium the historic center of Venice is. To tackle this question, methods derived from the field of game theory and specifically evolutionary game theory were used. With the agents (players) being the housing units, the designed theoretical model explored the population dynamics of the housing units in Venice given the three options of homeownership or long-term renting (residential); short term renting or Airbnb (airbnb); and no use (vacant). The findings of our theoretical population game model were validated and discussed with a dataset describing the usage patterns in the city of Venice during the past 20 years. A verification of the outcome through further case studies could eventually provide insights into the future behavior of tourism’s pressure in historic urban areas.
- Turner, M. & Potdar, K. (2021). ‘Metaheritage – beyond the historic centre and ensemble’ Attributes: A way of understanding OUV for Tokyo National research institute for cultural properties. p. 145-157.
- F.P. Wagenaar & J. Rodenberg, (2020). ‘Listing to survive. Why the Dutch traveler community wanted to have its heritage officially recognized’, The International Journal of Cultural Policy DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2020.1727457.
In recent times, the Dutch Traveler community has successfully gained official recognition of its heritage. At first glance, one would consider that Tajfel’s ‘creativity’ – in this case a desire to change a ‘negative social identity’ through the use of heritage – explains the aim of the community to gain official recognition. However, if ‘creativity’ were responsible for this aspiration, it would be an extreme and radical form of it. The aim of the Traveler community to preserve its way of life and its survival as an ‘ethnic group’ lies at the heart of its motivation to strive for official recognition of its heritage and use this recognition as a weapon against the local authorities. In this interesting case of legal ‘instrumentalization’ of cultural heritage, the actions of the Dutch Traveler community prompted changes in governmental policies. Prior to receiving official recognition of their heritage, policies were often aimed at abolishing their way of life.
- Future Making in The Anthropocene article series by Teun van de Ende, 2021. Featuring Burgers, GLM: https://heritagetribune.eu/europe/future-making-in-the-anthropocene/
- Dore, M. (2020). The Chakkar. “The Redesign of New Delhi’s Central Vista, and the Colonial Stripes of Narendra Modi.”https://www.thechakkar.com/home/centralvista
Ducci, M., Burgers, GLM (2019-2021) https://heriland4appia.wordpress.com/
Egberts, L. (2020) DEAL! “Erfgoed als basisvoor veerkracht” https://www.erfgoeddeal.nl/publicaties/magazines/tijdschrift-deal/10/23/tijdschrift-deal-nummer-1
Egberts, L. (2020) Waddenacademie. “Opinie: Differentiatie is de sleutel voor een veerdienst die past bij de eilander identiteit” https://www.waddenacademie.nl/nieuws/nieuwsbericht/opinie-differentiatie-is-de-sleutel-voor-een-veerdienst-die-past-bij-de-eilander-identiteit
Meparishvili, T. (2019). “History of Conservation of Florence.” https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-btu/frontdoor/index/index/docId/5063
Meparishvili, T. (2020). Urbanistica Tre. “Facing Uncomfortable Heritage, Interpreting the Totalitarian Past.” http://www.urbanisticatre.uniroma3.it/dipsu/?portfolio=facing-uncomfortable-heritage