We propose a mathematical framework for developing social-choice games that are designed to mediate decision-making processes for city planning, urban area redevelopment, and architectural configuration of urban housing complexes. The proposed framework features a digital serious gaming approach for participatory design to support transparency and inclusion in the process of decision-making and ensure an equitable balance of sustainable development goals in spatial design outcomes. The mathematical process consists of a Markovian design machine for balancing the design decisions of actors, a massing configurator equipped with fuzzy logic and multi-criteria decision analysis, algebraic graph-theoretical accessibility evaluators, and automated solar-climatic evaluators using geospatial computational geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework by implementing a multi-player online game that facilitates a participatory decision-making workshop for forming multi-functional building complexes by providing a generative configurator equipped with automated appraisal/scoring mechanisms for revealing the aggregate impact of alternatives. The EquiCity game empowers a group of decision-makers to reach a fair consensual spatial design by mathematically simulating many rounds of reasonable trade-offs between their decisions, with different levels of interest or control over various types of investments. The novelty of the framework is in its capability to encompass decision-making about the most idiosyncratic aspects of a site related to its heritage status and cultural significance to the most generic aspects such as balancing access to sunlight for the site while respecting ‘the right to sunlight’ of the neighbours of the site, ensuring coherence of the entire configuration with regards to a network of desired closeness ratings, the satisfaction of a programme of requirements, and intricately balancing individual development goals in conjunction with communal goals and environmental design codes.

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Experts have always played an important role in heritage planning, practice, and theory. There is a wealth of literature published every year regarding heritage and its cultural significance. Experts also contribute to heritage planning and developing policy documents. Still, literature is rarely used as a source of primary research to systematically reveal and compare experts’ opinions on the cultural significance of built heritage. Analyzing them as a whole is costly and time-consuming, especially on built heritage, when much has been written about. While the automation of methods has proven to mitigate such restrictions in other fields, as digital humanities, their application in heritage planning, practice, and theory is still scarce. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the potentials of AI models (e.g., multi label text classification) in analyzing scientific documents, revealing the cultural significance of built heritage, values and attributes. This was done to better understand the similarities and differences between the experts’ opinions. Yazd, Iran, is taken a case study, with a particular focus on windcatchers, a key attribute conveying cultural significance, of outstanding universal value, due to its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This paper has three subsequent phases: 1) state of the art on the application of AI in heritage planning; 2) methodology of data collection and data analysis related to coding values and attributes of windcatchers, addressed in relevant documents; 3) preliminary findings on the experts’ opinions over values and attributes of windcatchers. Results contribute to the scientific discussion, revealing the cultural significance of windcatchers of Yazd from experts’ point of view. Besides, the potential of AI for heritage planning is revealed in terms of (de)coding and measuring the cultural significance of built heritage from the available documents, showing the opinions of experts with various backgrounds. This model can be applied to other key attributes in Yazd and other case studies and scales to support heritage planning, practice, and theory.

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Public participation has been growing in both theory and practice of urban planning, including heritage planning. The reasoning is to facilitate the involvement of a broader group of stakeholders, beyond experts. More specifically, for heritage planning, participation could enable consensus-building on defining the significance of heritage, namely attributes (the resources that should be listed as heritage), and values (the reasons that attributes are important). However, there is not yet a holistic understanding of the influencing factors behind consensus-building in the participatory planning processes for cultural heritage. To evaluate existing research from this angle, a systematic literature review was conducted on peer-reviewed articles using the Scopus database. As most of the studies focuse on urban planning, this research examines the factors influencing consensus-building in the participatory planning process applied to urban and heritage planning and reflects on the applicability of these factors in heritage planning. The main factors were identified inductively and grouped into two categories: 1) public participation: actors, methods, and levels of public participation, and 2) consensus: approaches, and conflicts. The relations between these factors and their frequencies are investigated using statistical analysis methods, namely frequency analysis, independent-samples t-test, and Spearman correlation. The literature confirms that urban planning has applied more diverse methods and tools for public participation compared to studies in the field of heritage planning, and could inspire heritage planning. Conflict is recognized as an intertwined concept with consensus which is considered either as a challenge or as a necessity for an inclusive decision-making. By proposing a framework integrating these factors and sub-factors and illustrating their relationships, this research could also be useful for decision-makers and practitioners to better tailor the public participation process and means to implement it, considering the relevant factors involved.@en

Social media platforms have been increasingly used by locals and tourists to express their opinions about buildings, cities, and built heritage in particular. Most recently, scholars have been using social media to conduct innovative research on built heritage and heritage management. Still, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to analyze social media data for heritage management is seldom explored. This paper investigates the potentials of short texts (sentences and hashtags) shared through social media as a data source and artificial intelligence methods for data analysis for revealing the cultural significance (values and attributes) of built heritage. The city of Yazd, Iran was taken as a case study, with the particular focus on windcatchers, key attributes conveying outstanding universal values, as inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This paper has three subsequent phases: 1) state of the art on the intersection of public participation in heritage management and social media research; 2) methodology of data collection and data analysis related to coding people's voices from Instagram and Twitter into values of windcatchers over the last ten-years; 3) preliminary findings on the comparison between opinions of locals and tourists, sentiment analysis, and its association with the values and attributes of windcatchers. Results indicate that the age value is recognized as the most important value by all interest groups, while the political value is the least acknowledged. Besides, the negative sentiments are scarcely reflected (e.g., critiques) in social media. Results confirm the potential of social media for heritage management in terms of (de)coding and measuring the cultural significance of built heritage for windcatchers and also other attributes in Yazd and other case studies and scales.

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The data presented in this Data in Brief article offers an insight into the scientific literature on conceptual and empirical approaches to public participation and consensus-building. It consists of articles retrieved from the Scopus search engine which feature “public participation”, “consensus”, and “value and attribute” in the title, abstract, and author keywords. Information on the bibliography is recorded, namely title, author(s), year of publication, and source title. Metadata on how the articles were analyzed is provided in the dataset. From 121 publications, most literature (103) analyzes public participation through case studies. The studies were analyzed according to factors that were identified inductively and grouped in two categories: 1) public participation: actor, method, and level of public participation, and 2) consensus: approaches, conflict. The data is related to the research article entitled “Public participation and consensus-building in urban planning from the lens of heritage planning: A systematic literature review”. This paper focuses on the public participation factors as the factors on consensus are already explained in the main article. This paper shows which factors of participation were implemented in the analyzed studies. Given that, this article contributes to researchers and practitioners working on public participation because it reveals the diversity of approaches for consensus-building in public participation processes, which help them realize which level of participation they want to achieve and the means to reach it.

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This article concentrates on ways in which novel playful technologies can engage youth in co-creation of living environments. The presented study focuses on five selected prototypes of serious digital geogames and gamified storytelling that were developed specifically for younger generations of users. The analysis concentrates on reviewing their goals, game story, outcomes, and the results of testing serious digital geogames prototypes with youth. It leads to a set of identified urban planning engagement forms that can be well supported with the help of serious digital geogames. They include exploring landscapes, learning about places, learning about specific topics, reconstructing the past, envisioning the future, connecting with action projects, and communicating. The article concludes with the discussion of the main findings and perspectives for further research.

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Architectural redesign risks damaging or destroying built heritage, especially when designers are unaware of its cultural significance. This needs to be prevented, as built heritage is a human right, as coined by the 2005 Faro Convention. As a result, architects are now encouraged to conduct values-based redesigns with a broader range of stakeholders in order to uncover the cultural relevance of built heritage and co-create their redesigns. This shift in perspective, from one that was formerly expert-based and individualistic, aims to better preserve built heritage and its cultural relevance. Students, the architects of tomorrow, must acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitude to master this shift in perspective. This chapter reports on the lessons learned when teaching values-based redesign in gamified learning environments (GLEs) in two courses offered to architecture students by the Heritage and Architecture Section of the TUDelft, in the Netherlands. GLEs were chosen because of their known efficacy in enhancing stakeholder involvement and contributing to decisionmaking processes in other contexts. Results revealed that even if students are more aware of heritage value, their redesign decisions are more often guided by their personal values, rather than collective values (i.e. cultural significance). Values-based design and co-creation are not relevant for the redesign of built heritage only. The lessons learned in this research can help develop learning objectives across bachelor and master programs so that students learn to engage with different stakeholders in different contexts. Elsewhere, this new approach is being applied in practice, often without training. In this situation, training new architects on the use of GLEs as engagement tools contributes to their professional development, fostering a culture of greater participation and co-creation in urban planning, architecture and built heritage.@en

Social media has been increasingly used by various communities to express their opinions, values, and feelings about cities and, in particular, built heritage. Social media platforms, interactive technologies used by virtual communities and networks became an important source for recent innovative studies on participatory heritage management. Amongst them, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to analyze social media data for heritage management, in particular peoples’ feelings and their relation to cultural significance(values and attributes), is seldom explored. This chapter explores the potential of social media content as a data source and artificial intelligence methods to analyze people’s feelings and opinions about the cultural significance of built heritage. The city of Yazd, Iran, was taken as a case study, with a specific focus on windcatchers(architectural element used for natural ventilation), a key urban attribute also conveying outstanding universal value, ever since inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017. This chapter details: 1) the state of the art on participatory heritage management using social media; 2) the methodology to extract values and sentiments assigned to windcatchers on Instagram and Twitter posts over the last ten years; 3) and last, the preliminary findings on the values of windcatchers, sentiment and emotion analysis, and the association analysis between the values of windcatchers and emotions. Results indicate the most and least addressed categories of values and emotions. Moreover, some potential relations between values and emotions (e.g., economic, ecological, and scientific values with trust) are revealed. Besides, it became proven that negative sentiments over windcatchers of Yazd are scarcely expressed (e.g., critiques) in social media. This study confirms the potential of social media for heritage management in terms of (de)coding and measuring the values of heritage attributes and related feelings. This research is useful to the windcatchers in Yazd, but also replicable to other case studies and scales.@en

Heritage cities and communities have been hit with pandemics throughout history, however COVID-19 represents an unprecedented challenge in terms of scale and impact on the built environment. Communities with a strong sense of place attachment have been self-organizing and raising their voices over their city’s sustainability. How can heritage cities achieve greater conservation and sustainability post-COVID-19? What are the social and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the built environment? What is the role of social and ecological values in decision-making and design and redesign for a self-organizing post-COVID-19 city? Research is needed in bottom-up initiatives to assess the role of cultural and sustainability values and impacts in architectural and urban attributes. By analyzing social media, we investigate the case of Venezia Pulita (Clean Venice) to obtain an insight in the level of public engagement with regards to social practice, public formation and/or sense of place, the societal actors involved, and the characteristics of critics and of initiatives in terms of values and attributes. A review of posts by inhabitants in Italian language will be used to validate the analysis. Results indicate a new (digital) era in which local communities play a protagonist role in the sustainability of heritage cities.@en

The climate crisis has inspired youth-led activism across the world and young people now lead global campaigns and political protest on climate justice. However, aside from news media coverage of youth activism and the attendant focus on young people’s hand-drawn protest placards, relatively little is known about young people’s views on the actions needed to respond to the climate crisis or how they imagine environmentally-sustainable futures. This visual essay addresses that lacuna by exploring young people’s ideas about local climate actions. The images selected for consideration were created using Minecraft, the 3D block-building visualisation game, at workshops held in Ireland. Young people and their families were invited to create environmentally-sustainable futures at Minecraft workshops. Exploring these 3D designs as images, the essay documents young people’s visual representations of desirable climate actions and reflects on these Minecraft images to shed light on how young people envision alternative climate futures. These collective visions, or climate imaginaries, are powerful indicators of what young people imagine is possible in the future. In doing so, they present an alternative to the mainstream news and entertainment media preoccupation with dystopian constructions of the climate crisis. They also highlight the power of Minecraft as a visual medium to open up new ways of seeing nature and of envisioning nature-society relations. The selected images were also exhibited as part of the CLIMATE Look Lab 2022 held at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The gallery invited researchers, community groups and artists to use the gallery as a lab space to engage visitors with our changing environment and to explore how images can change the visual narrative on climate change.@en

This article deals with questions and practices involving the debate on the role of shared urban values as a measure of an interactive and healthy urban life to design the post-pandemic city based on the ethics of collaboration and trust. It was in this sense that, over a series of teaching and research activities at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Ireland, we proposed the application of narrative of resilience and serious geogames in the debate of care in public engagement. This was done in order to assess their potential in designing possible common futures through ludic elements as an approach to emancipatory learning and action. The results of these experimental activities and the participants' feedback point to the formulation of an “open” methodology, which unfolds, based on epistemologies and local actors, for the weaving of collaborative and resilient urban landscapes in the face of the problem 1) the unsustainability of urban development opposed to community values; 2) the digital revolution and the rise of individualism and detachment, and 3) urban diversity in decay due to the increase in privatization, suppression or restriction of accessing public spaces and everyday life. Next steps of the research will focus on the creation of an original game in mixed reality for the co-creation of the post-pandemic city based on care between the inhabitants and the territory at a new level of depth of engagement through hope.@en

This chapter concentrates on the implementation of the geogame GeoMinasCraft and its use for geographical virtual explorations. The game was implemented to study the use of geospatial data for the visualizations of landscapes in a serious game. The users/players can take on an adventure, explore the landscapes, learn about geodiversity, and face different challenges. The game takes us to the City of Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais in Brazil. The city was selected due to its historical significance and socio-cultural values. We used satellite images and transformed them into blocks imitating these real-world landscapes and cities in Minecraft. We tested the game prototype with nine students which gave us the needed feedback for the improvements of the first prototype. This chapter summarizes the game concept, its implementation, and the testing results. We conclude the chapter with a discussion and further research directions.

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Applying imaging to architectural and urban heritage studies is not new. Drawing, painting and pho-tographing, and most recently digital imaging have been applied as techniques for the representation and preservation of heritage buildings, cities and landscapes. New technologies and media in the service of heritage is a fast-growing field, best known as virtual or digital heritage (Wang et al., 2020). Such immersive experiences include Virtual Reality (VR), Serious Geogames have been enhancing and enriching how people experience heritage, improving and upscaling public involvement and knowledge about its cultural significance.@en

This paper explores tangible and intangible characteristics of places. It concentrates on gathering characteristics, emotions, memories and stories related to self-selected evocative places in a city. Evocative places are defined as places that evoke images, memories or emotions. There are two goals identified for this article. The first goal is to study which words citizens use to describe the main characteristics of their self-selected evocative places. The second goal is to map emotions associated with the self-selected evocative places. The case study selected in this research is the city of Vitória in Brazil. We collected 192 evocative places and their characteristics with the help of an online mapping platform that links an online questionnaire with an interactive map. This paper summarizes the main results gathered empirically about evocative places in Vitória, their characteristics and the emotions felt at these places. These places are then mapped in a geographic information system (GIS) in order to understand their locations and concentrations. On the basis of this empirical work in Vitória , and the work accomplished in the cities of Hamburg (Germany), Vienna (Austria), Ames and Grinnell (both Iowa, USA), we also designed and expanded the conceptual model of evocative places presented in this paper for the first time. The conceptual model includes four main categories with which an evocative place can be described including its physical characteristics, experiences, senses and values. We conclude the article with a discussion and further research directions.@en

World Heritage cities (WHC), meaning urban areas, often in part, inscribed at the UNESCO World Heritage list are valuable heritages to many local and global communities and, therefore, attract efforts to conserve them. Nonetheless, these cities are increasingly under pressure, by globalization, climate change, and tourism. An integral approach, interlinking urban development, and conservation, as proposed by the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL approach), foreseen to promote a more sustainable development. This means that public participation plays an essential role in consensus building among the varied stakeholders on related decision making processes, in particular on what is a heritage (attributes) in their city and why (values) to be conserved.The HUL approach underlines people‘s role by proposing public participation as a tool, recommending authorities to involve the community in their urban and heritage management processes. Being an international recommendation, the HUL approach does not specify a framework for public participation, nor reference the critical factors affecting the public participation processes, as these are expected to differ, depending on the context. It does reference the aim for consensus specificly to the cultural significance (attributes and values) of the city among all stakeholders.This paper aims to present the results of a part of a systematic literature review, revealing the knowledge and gaps in the state-of-the-art in studies that focus on public participation as a tool to reach consensus. The eligible studies were evaluated on four criteria: 1) context and field of the project, 2) public participation process, 3) consensus. Besides highlighting its conceptual complexities and contradictions, this paper also puts forward recommendations to guide future research. Results can be relevant for cities seeking public participation frameworks to implement the HUL approach. @en

In this chapter, we concentrate on geogames for change that enable the cocreation of cities. We introduce theoretical foundations of serious geogames for urban planning and the concepts of playfulness in civic engagement. Two case studies include the serious geogames Geodesign Card Game and GeoMinasCraft. They represent examples of how games can be implemented in a sustainable and participatory urban planning process engaging that engages children and youth. We demonstrate their main functionalities that can be used in urban planning processes, including virtual interaction, experimenting, exploring, designing, learning, communicating, negotiating and consensus building. We present the gameplay of these two selected geogames for change as implemented for the first round of tests with children and youth. We then summarise the main functions of these games and associate them with the phases of sustainable urban planning processes. The planning process was proposed by UN-HABITAT in order to stimulate sustainable planning practices in municipalities. We summarise the main findings and conclude the article with observations related to the game design and implementation of geogames for change in urban planning processes.@en

Esta pesquisa baseia-se na abordagem territorialista italiana que articula uma aproximação conceitual, metodológica e prática do patrimônio territorial, a uma participação multicolorida de crianças no contexto de Santa Leopoldina, um município de montanha do estado do Espírito Santo, no Brasil. Entre os cidadãos, aqueles que geralmente não são considerados nos processos de planejamento e gestão do território, como as crianças, estão envolvidos aqui na elaboração de representações de valores patrimoniais, através de desenhos individuais e coletivos e intervenções lúdicas nos espaços públicos. Os aspectos perceptivos e cognitivos das crianças são transpostos para o mapeamento digital com a tecnologia de geoinformação, atribuindo-lhes também uma gradação de alto, médio e baixo valores. Em suma, a pesquisa reforça um caminho consolidado na Itália, mas novo no Brasil, onde o foco no patrimônio e nas crianças pode significar um investimento positivo no projeto de valorização e transformação da cidade.@en