An increase in ambient air temperature due to climate change can adversely affect indoor thermal conditions, particularly in heritage-listed dwellings, as renovation efforts may be limited by preservation constraints, potentially leading to indoor overheating for occupants. Incorporating heritage-listed dwellings into the climate change adaptation strategies is essential. Heritage-listed dwellings exhibit varying preservation constraints, with character-defining elements differing across cases. A literature review indicates a deficiency in research regarding climate change adaptation for lilong houses, which are two- to three-storey terrace houses featuring timber-brick structures, predominantly constructed in late 19th and early 20th century Shanghai, and recognised as significant urban heritage of the city. Through building energy simulations, this article examines the climate change adaptation of heritage-listed apartment-style lilong houses in Shanghai. Overheating hours and degree hours are utilised to assess indoor overheating conditions. Three scenarios for the preservation of the building envelope are proposed: (1) preservation of walls, (2) preservation of windows, (3) preservation of the roof. There are five categories of climate change adaptation measures. The findings indicate that substantial reductions can be attained by implementing a single preservation scenario customised to the character-defining elements and preservation constraints of heritage-listed dwellings. The most significant decrease in the number of overheating hours is observed in the wall preservation scenario, with a reduction of 69%, followed by a 53% reduction in the roof preservation scenario and a 31% reduction in the window preservation scenario. The proposed preservation scenarios enable the improvement in building indoor thermal conditions without compromising heritage preservation.

The Netherlands has established climate-adaptive strategies shaped by its long history of water-related climate events, such as the floods in 1421 and 1953. UNESCO World Heritage (WH) properties in The Netherlands reflect centuries of human intervention and natural processes to adapt and mitigate climate challenges, including spatial design and hydraulic engineering. The Dutch Climate Research Initiative also highlights cultural heritage as an integral component in preparing for the 2026 National Climate Adaptation Strategy. This article aims to unveil climate-adaptive World Heritage management strategies (CAWHMSs), using WH properties in The Netherlands as a case study. It collects textual data from Statements of Outstanding Universal Value, State of Conservation Reports by the State Parties and management plans. Through qualitative coding and keywords aggregation of the documents, the visualised results of a Sankey diagram and two semantic networks confirmed two CAWHMSs: conservation and developing WH properties as collaborative knowledge hubs. Conservation supports regulating urban climate and sustainable water management. As collaborative knowledge hubs, multidisciplinary sectors explore opportunities to align WH properties with broader sustainable development initiatives. They also deepen younger generations’ awareness of cultural and natural significance relevant to mitigating climate threats. The results emphasise WH as a contributor to climate adaptation. Cross-sectoral stakeholders can advance holistic climate adaptation efforts using CAWHMSs.

In 1972, Christopher Stone’s seminal essay, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, challenged anthropocentric legal frameworks by proposing legal rights for non-human entities, sparking a paradigm shift in environmental law and ethics (Stone, 1972). More than 50 years later, the extension of legal rights to non-human entities has evolved significantly, with non-human stakeholders such as rivers and ecosystems being granted legal personhood in various jurisdictions worldwide (e.g. Boyd, 2017; Kauffman & Martin, 2021). [...]

Heritage planning is changing, in both theory and practice. There is greater attention to the cultural significance (values and attributes) conveyed to a heritage property, rather than focusing on the property alone. Identifying and revealing this cultural significance has become a critical step in heritage planning. Moreover, international guidelines increasingly encourage public participation in defining the cultural significance of heritage sites. However, effectively involving diverse stakeholders and capturing the cultural significance they attribute to heritage remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with extensive datasets and multiple stakeholders. Although automated methods have shown potential in fields like digital humanities, their application in heritage planning is still limited. This article explores the innovative use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly text classification analysis, to analyze unstructured textual data (e.g., policy documents, literature, and social media) to uncover the cultural significance of built heritage. Focusing on Yazd, Iran, and specifically on windcatchers—a key cultural attribute recognized for its “outstanding universal value” by UNESCO—this study integrates AI to enhance both urban and socio-cultural planning. This article, as the concluding piece of a broader research project, synthesizes the project’s findings to highlight AI’s potential for inclusive heritage planning, referencing related publications of the same project to provide context while remaining concise. The research is structured in three phases: first, a literature review on AI applications in participatory heritage planning and value-based heritage planning; second, the methodology for data collection and analysis, including coding and comparing values and attributes of windcatchers conveyed by different stakeholders; and third, findings on the values and attributes, and their interrelationships as revealed through the data. The results confirm that while there are both conflicts and alignments in the cultural significance attributed to windcatchers in Yazd among various stakeholders, the theoretical framework presented here offers a valuable tool for heritage planning. By decoding and measuring cultural significance from diverse perspectives, this framework aids in identifying conflicts and alignments and in better aligning stakeholder perspectives. This model can be adapted to other key attributes in Yazd and other case studies, offering broader applications in heritage planning. Additionally, the findings underscore the potential of AI to evaluate the legislative framework’s effectiveness in enhancing public engagement.

As urbanization accelerates, World Heritage properties, critical conservation areas, face a growing threat of urban densification, jeopardizing their Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). States Parties, the countries that have ratified the World Heritage Convention, are responsible for submitting periodic reports on the state-of-conservation of their World Heritage properties. These reports should explicitly address any instances of urban densification that may be occurring. But do they? This research investigates the relationship between urban densification and reporting practices in World Heritage properties over time and space. Through a spatiotemporal analysis, by analyzing changes in the built-up area within the core zones of cultural World Heritage properties from 1985 to 2015. We found that urban development, including housing, infrastructure, and tourism facilities, has significantly impacted World Heritage properties and an increase in built-up area can be observed especially in properties not reporting on urban threats.

Purpose
Interventions are essential for the management of built heritage because they extend the lifespan of buildings and enable them to be enjoyed by multiple generations. International organisations and institutions, such as UNESCO and ICOMOS, have adopted doctrinal documents over time, stimulating best practices in built heritage management worldwide. Although these documents are often referenced in academic work, they are seldom systematically researched. Which interventions are referenced or omitted? Are they defined? What trends are noted in the understanding of best practices as interventions?

Design/methodology/approach
This research consists of a systematic content analysis of nine international doctrinal documents, which were selected from nearly seventy international doctrinal documents—mainly adopted by UNESCO and ICOMOS. The main aim is to reveal and compare the concepts used for reference interventions and further use the definitions to reveal and discuss the relationships between them. The trends of these interventions being used were determined based on the frequency of mentions per intervention term in the selected documents.

Findings
Regarding the definition of the intervention concepts, there are three main findings. First, instead of being treated as a single concept, ‘conservation’ has been presented as an umbrella concept for other interventions and thus has been the most popular concept since the first version (1992) of the New Zealand Charter was implemented. In contrast, ‘preservation’ remains a single concept, among the highest scales, to maintain the integrity of built heritage, including use. Second, ‘repair’ was found to play a paradoxical role between ‘restoration’ and ‘reconstruction’, which created divergent opinions in the documents. Third, since the notions of ‘use’ have expanded from the functions of monuments (International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites: The Venice Charter, 1964) to the ‘associations of places’ (The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, with associated Guidelines and Code on the Ethics of Co-existence, 1999; The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, 2013), which include activities, traditional habits, accessibility, etc., the complexity of mentioning different forms of ‘use’ has led to some (re)interventions, such as ‘adaptation’, ‘adaptive reuse’, and ‘rehabilitation’, being put into grey areas and used interchangeably.

Originality
This research advances the current understanding of intervention concepts and their relationships, as well as differences and similarities in definitions.

The dataset, underlying the paper “Do I See What You See?” was selected for the project Nexum: Data 4 Art, organised by 4TU. The art pieces by Kuangyi Xing were exhibited in June 2024 in WORM and in the Dutch Design Week 2024 in Eindhoven.

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.

Much of the building stock subjected to the upcoming European Renovation Wave is neither listed as heritage nor considered valuable architecture. This also applies to Dutch housing built between 1965 and 1985, more than 30% of the Dutch housing stock, for which there is no consensus on their cultural significance. Their successful renovation process requires broad support. What attributes do citizens consider significant in their neighbourhood? How do we include a multitude of stakeholders? And can digital methods help collect and process responses? This article reveals significant attributes of residential neighbourhoods from 1965 to 1985, assessed by various stakeholders with a digital tool based on case studies in Amsterdam and Almere. A mobile application allowed individuals to identify significant attributes at various scales while visiting the neighbourhood. By qualitative data analysis of survey and interview results, groups of tangible and intangible attributes were deduced. Results show that identifying attributes by current stakeholders broadens existing expert-led assessments on 1965–1985 neighbourhoods by including, for example, generic attributes not originally intended by the designers. Asking open-ended questions is considered essential to identify undiscovered attributes by alternative stakeholders, although dealing with large numbers of responses is recognised as a challenge to cluster and classify. Lastly, the mobile application appears to be a useful digital tool, but integrating scientific consistency and usability is recommended for further development. Engaging multiple stakeholders with such mobile applications allows for collecting opinions, anticipating conflicts, or shared interests between stakeholders and integration into renovation designs. It can empower citizens to preserve the neighbourhood attributes that are most significant to them.

Cultural heritage, especially those inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, is meant to be valued by mankind and protected for future generations. Triggered by radical and sometimes disastrous Heritage-Related Events (HREs), communities around the world are actively involved on social media to share their opinions and emotional attachments. This paper presents exploratory data analyses on a dataset collected from Twitter concerning HREs in World Heritage that triggered global concerns, with cases of the Notre Dame Paris fire and the Venice flood, both in 2019. The spatiotemporal patterns of tweeting behaviours of online communities before, during, and after the event demonstrate a clear distinction of activation levels caused by the HREs. The dominant emotions and topics of people during the online debate are detected and visualized with pre-trained deep-learning models and unsupervised clustering algorithms. Clear spatiotemporal dynamics can be observed from the data collected in both case studies, while each case also demonstrated its specific characteristics due to the different severity. The methodological framework proposed and the analytical outcomes obtained in this paper could be used both in urban studies to mine the public opinions about HREs and other urban events for reducing risks, and by the Geo-AI community to test spatiotemporal clustering algorithms.

Purpose: Attributes conveying cultural significance play a key role in heritage management, as well as in differentiating interventions in built heritage. However, seldom the relation between interventions and attributes, either tangible or intangible, has been researched systematically. How do both tangible and intangible attributes and interventions relate? What attributes make interventions on built heritage differ? Design/methodology/approach: This paper conducts a systematic content analysis of forty-one international doctrinal documents—mainly adopted by the Council of Europe, UNESCO and ICOMOS, between 1877 and 2021. The main aim is to reveal and compare the selected eight intervention concepts, namely—restoration (C1), preservation (C2), conservation (C3), adaptation (C4), rehabilitation (C5), relocation (C6), reconstruction (C7) and renewal (C8)—and their definitions, in relation to attributes, both tangible and intangible. The intensity of the relationship between intervention concepts and attributes is determined based on the frequency of the mentioned attributes per intervention. Findings: There were three key findings. First, although the attention to intangible attributes has increased in the last decades, the relationship between interventions and tangible attributes remains stronger. The highest frequency of referencing the tangible attributes was identified in “relocation” and “preservation,” while the lowest was in “rehabilitation.” Second, certain attributes play contradictory roles, e.g. “material,” “use” and “process,” which creates inconsistent definitions between documents. Third, as attributes often include one another in building layers, they trigger the intervention concepts in hierarchical patterns. Originality/value: This paper explores and discusses the results of a novel comparative analysis between different intervention concepts and definitions, with a particular focus on the attributes. The results can support further research and practice, clarifying the identified differences and similarities.

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage can contribute to sustainable development and circular economy, preventing waste production and resource depletion by extending the heritage lifespan. This reuse is limited by challenges mostly identified at the case study level. However, further theorising these challenges could enrich the related body of knowledge and contribute to their mitigation. By defining a theoretical framework, this research builds on the cross-sectional analysis of adaptive reuse undertaken in three European cities: Amsterdam, Rijeka, and Salerno. The challenges were identified by representatives of the public, private, knowledge, and non-profit sectors through stakeholder engagement workshops. Examples of challenges common to the three cities are shortcomings in existing approaches; lack of awareness and capacity; cultural heritage interpretation and management; data management; costs; conflicting interests; lack of knowledge; lack of participatory processes; and compliance with regulations and policies. Being identified in diverse European cities, these challenges can be representative within the European region. Arguably, some of these challenges also apply to other regions since they were reported in case studies from Asia, North America, and Oceania. Addressing these challenges could contribute to sustainable development by potentially contributing towards efforts to achieve ten of the Sustainable Development Goals, as some challenges align with some of these goals.

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.

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage contributes to heritage conservation, leveraging on the heritage potential to enable sustainable development and enhance urban livability. Yet, it is seldom applied as intervention. This research furthers the knowledge on the challenges to the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage. Through the case study of Salerno (Italy) and a participatory methodology, this research organized a stakeholder engagement workshop, facilitating the interaction of stakeholders—representing the public, private, civic, and knowledge sectors, while using a theoretical framework based on the six steps of the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape approach to adopt a multi-scale perspective. The content analysis of the data reveals 55 themes encompassing challenges and solutions. These themes are presented in a general overview, followed by an in-depth reporting of the five most discussed themes, i.e. knowledge production and management, participation, valorization, approaches, and cooperation. Besides the contribution to science, this research also offers an overview of challenges and possible solutions for prospective stakeholders in the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage, informing future decision- and policy-making activities towards greater sustainable development within the built environment.

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.

The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of “monuments and groups of buildings” (73.2%), “sites” (19.3%), and “cultural landscapes” (7.5%). Land-cover changes in the WHL properties between 2015 and 2020 were automatically extracted from big data collections of high-resolution satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine using intelligent remote sensing classification. Sustainability indexes (SIs) were estimated for the protection zones of each property, and the results were employed, for the first time, to assess the progress of each country toward SDG Target 11.4. Despite the apparent advances in SIs (10.4%), most countries either exhibited steady (20.0%) or declining (69.6%) SIs due to limited cultural investigations and enhanced negative anthropogenic disturbances. This study confirms that land-cover changes are among serious threats for heritage conservation, with heritage in some countries wherein the need to address this threat is most crucial, and the proposed spatiotemporal monitoring approach is recommended.

Although attention for citizen involvement in urban development and heritage management processes is growing, both in practice and in research, the specifics of stakeholders’ interests have been less researched. This paper reveals and discusses the assessment by individuals and groups, to differentiate stakeholders, based on the heritage significance they convey on neighbourhood attributes. Fifty-nine interviews on a Dutch neighbourhood in Amsterdam Zuidoost were analysed integrating quantitative and qualitative methods. Results confirm important differences between and within stakeholder groups regarding their interest in particular attribute categories and scales, indicating the need to further specify stakeholders beyond the commonly used ‘community’ and ‘experts’. The identification of stakeholder interests is important to involve relevant groups in the identification and designation of significant attributes, buildings, and areas and to anticipate potential conflicts or shared interests in neighbourhood renovation processes.

Mapping cultural significance of heritage properties in urban environment from the perspective of the public has become an increasingly relevant process, as highlighted by the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). With the ubiquitous use of social media and the prosperous developments in machine and deep learning, it has become feasible to collect and process massive amounts of information produced by online communities about their perceptions of heritage as social constructs. Moreover, such information is usually inter-connected and embedded within specific socioeconomic and spatiotemporal contexts. This paper presents a methodological workflow for using semi-supervised learning with graph neural networks (GNN) to classify, summarize, and map cultural significance categories based on user-generated content on social media. Several GNN models were trained as an ensemble to incorporate the multi-modal (visual and textual) features and the contextual (temporal, spatial, and social) connections of social media data in an attributed multi-graph structure. The classification results with different models were aligned and evaluated with the prediction confidence and agreement. Furthermore, message diffusion methods on graphs were proposed to aggregate the post labels onto their adjacent spatial nodes, which helps to map the cultural significance categories in their geographical contexts. The workflow is tested on data gathered from Venice as a case study, demonstrating the generation of social perception maps for this UNESCO World Heritage property. This research framework could also be applied in other cities worldwide, contributing to more socially inclusive heritage management processes. Furthermore, the proposed methodology holds the potential of diffusing any human-generated location-based information onto spatial networks and temporal timelines, which could be beneficial for measuring the safety, vitality, and/or popularity of urban spaces.

Governance, and specifically local management and institutional systems, is among the key factors affecting the management of World Heritage (WH) properties in urban contexts. The adoption of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL approach) promotes a governance reform towards more inclusive and integrated management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the HUL approach may help to solve the key governance challenges affecting WH in urban contexts. The governance of WH in three European cities is compared. Edinburgh, Porto, and Florence were chosen for their familiarity with the HUL approach and willingness to provide guidance and review policies and review their policies as management plans. The methodology includes a policy analysis of the management plans followed by a comparative analysis based on the six key governance challenges addressed in the recent literature. The results show that the HUL approach is supporting the governance of WH in urban contexts, and that more inclusive and integrated management has helped address the challenges affecting heritage management.