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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.