“Let Us Save Venice”—An Educational Online Maze Game for Climate Resilience

Climate resilience competencies improve people’s capacity to recognize and adopt strategies for mitigating negative climate effects. Especially concerning the built cultural heritage protection in the coastal areas, both professionals and citizens have to be prepared for water-related extreme events, such as floods, sea-level rise, and altered precipitation. Considering these challenges, the authors explore the efficiency of serious video games and describe the process of design and validation of the pilot educational online maze game “Let us save Venice”. More specifically, the main research question motivating the study is to identify what the experience factors and the mini-games are that contribute mostly to raising awareness to climate resilience and built heritage sustainability. The question implies two main research objectives: first, to explore what role user-centered game design plays in creating immersive and enjoyable educational video maze games, and second, to investigate which factors influence user experience and game playability in the design phase, and how they contribute to learnability and raising awareness. The background section of the article focuses on a preliminary study of the educational potential of serious games and introduces the EU-funded project e-Creha. Then, it explores the process of game design, development, and validation, focusing on metrics such as game learnability and game experience. The results outline the main findings that immersion, positive affect, and competence appeared to be the main experience factors contributing to raising awareness to climate resilience and built heritage sustainability. Lastly, the discussion section provides further directions for game improvement and future work.

Thinking Deep. Acting on Top. Underground Built Heritage and Its Fringe as a Community Catalyst for Local Sustainable Development: Exploratory Cases from Poland and Greece

Underground Built Heritage (UBH) is a distinct class of cultural heritage providing a focal point for community pride and engagement to become a springboard for local sustainable development (LSD). This research aims to articulate how local UBH and its fringe serve as a facilitator of communal identity to mobilize community care towards social and economic development with less involvement from the state and the market actors. For this purpose, local (and less-conspicuous) cases of UBH are employed in Warsaw, Poland, and Volos, Greece, indicating the power of UBH to connect and engage local communities with places, triggering a momentum for a truly bottom-up action that pays less attention to market considerations and state support. The studied UBH sites have been discussed according to an established common framework, dealing with five main issues: (a) general context and status, (b) history, (c) users and management, (d) ecosystem services, and (e) introduction of the paradigm of living labs. The analysis was based on a thorough literature review and complemented by field observations and interviews. The results provide evidence for UBH as a potential facilitator of social and economic development. The case studies in Poland and Greece showed that local actors were involved in activities and social networks of tacit knowledge, generating community building to reinforce bottom-up activities in contact with UBH.

Building Stories: Oral History, Built Heritage & Numinous Fabric

<p>Carman and Sørensen’s book Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches challenges us to reconsider and extend methodologies in heritage studies. This thesis takes inspiration from their book to ask how and why heritage practitioners and academics researching built heritage should use oral history as a useful qualitative tool in their research process. In the New Zealand context, researchers find it difficult to find information for the period that spans the Second World War to the present, due to the common practice of restricting access to recent official records and government documents, in most cases due to sensitivities about privacy, and the cessation of the Papers Past newspaper resource. This thesis asks if researchers could fill this gap by drawing on tools from the fields of public history and oral history and by doing this extend and refine the theory and practice of heritage studies and heritage management. To test this approach, I have undertaken a case study of the historic building, Ngaroma, in Wellington’s Lyall Bay. The methodology I have followed involved first delving into the building’s history through library and archival sources; I then conducted nine interviews with people who have had a connection to the building. The data I have gathered about both the physical and social fabric of Ngaroma and its history has built up a picture of life in the building. Memory, senses and emotion have emerged as important aspects of my findings. In analysing the results, I have extended the established binary understanding of the physical and social fabrics of the building and developed the concept of ‘numinous fabric’. In doing so I argue that we can identify the overlap between physical fabric and social fabric which can guide and inspire the way we can go about interviewing people by linking extant fabric with intangible things such as memories. This thesis finds that oral history can be used to tap into a rich source of material that adds depth and dimension to our understanding of the built heritage around us. It encourages all academics and heritage professionals researching historic buildings to undertake oral interviews as a central qualitative methodology and in doing so to bring together heritage theory and heritage management practice.</p>

Building Stories: Oral History, Built Heritage & Numinous Fabric

<p>Carman and Sørensen’s book Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches challenges us to reconsider and extend methodologies in heritage studies. This thesis takes inspiration from their book to ask how and why heritage practitioners and academics researching built heritage should use oral history as a useful qualitative tool in their research process. In the New Zealand context, researchers find it difficult to find information for the period that spans the Second World War to the present, due to the common practice of restricting access to recent official records and government documents, in most cases due to sensitivities about privacy, and the cessation of the Papers Past newspaper resource. This thesis asks if researchers could fill this gap by drawing on tools from the fields of public history and oral history and by doing this extend and refine the theory and practice of heritage studies and heritage management. To test this approach, I have undertaken a case study of the historic building, Ngaroma, in Wellington’s Lyall Bay. The methodology I have followed involved first delving into the building’s history through library and archival sources; I then conducted nine interviews with people who have had a connection to the building. The data I have gathered about both the physical and social fabric of Ngaroma and its history has built up a picture of life in the building. Memory, senses and emotion have emerged as important aspects of my findings. In analysing the results, I have extended the established binary understanding of the physical and social fabrics of the building and developed the concept of ‘numinous fabric’. In doing so I argue that we can identify the overlap between physical fabric and social fabric which can guide and inspire the way we can go about interviewing people by linking extant fabric with intangible things such as memories. This thesis finds that oral history can be used to tap into a rich source of material that adds depth and dimension to our understanding of the built heritage around us. It encourages all academics and heritage professionals researching historic buildings to undertake oral interviews as a central qualitative methodology and in doing so to bring together heritage theory and heritage management practice.</p>

What the Ground Says…

Ground, as a body incised by natural and human actions (European Landscape Convention), carries “stories”, going beyond quantitative values. As in a text, it holds the keys to understand what it covers or hides. In its thickness, it shelters “implicit projects”. Understanding its complexity requires a physical and perceptual commitment, challenging the body in space: dimensions gradually forgotten by Environmental Sciences. As a “threshold” between visible and invisible, Underground-Built-Heritage represents the reverse of the emerged world: hollow space, both generator and mirror of open space (cities, landscapes). The focus is on physical and mental relationships between these two worlds. Past and present relationships emerge, allowing hypotheses to reconstitute collective memories, practices, knowledge, and values, which serve territorial development. The “Three Countries Park” is a place for cross-border experimentation to test how UBH can rebuild common links for fragmented environments. The cavities of a geo-park (planned) and the tangles of underground mining architecture are the fragments of a vocabulary whose meaning communities have to relearn. Built undergrounds will, thus, emerge from common stories that revive the imagination of populations who have lost all notion of belonging to a place. UBH will become a vector of new territorial coherence linking the physical and mental perceptions of people.

Multicriteria decision-making to support preventive maintenance of built heritage in the historic center of Sobral, Brazil

PurposeThe study aims to identify and evaluate relevant criteria in the proposal and support of public administration policies for preventive maintenance comprised in a conservation approach to built heritage and aligned with local sustainable development of the historic center of the city of Sobral, in Brazil.Design/methodology/approachA novel multicriteria decision model adopting the Bayesian best-worst method is presented and its application and results are described. Though a systematic procedure, criteria were selected in order to protect the tangible and intangible values of cultural heritage, as well as its sustainable development. Then experts evaluate these criteria through an elicitation instrument.FindingsThe results show that for the decision problem over preventive maintenance, social contribution and historical record of built heritage are more important than its structural vulnerability, while architecture is less relevant. Due to the low restrictions, the subcriterion related to this property has the least influence. The weights can assist in the characterization of measures and policies for the protection of the built cultural heritage.Originality/valueThe use of a novel decision-making method in cultural heritage is an important initiative, given the frequent use of simple and inefficient methods. The identified and weighted criteria are important data to characterize the scenario and the topic. The results contribute to protection and development of the built heritage, encouraging the implementation of preventive conservation in the historic center, conferring to the public administration valuable information to support and propose initiatives.

Community-led initiatives for the rehabilitation and management of vernacular settlements in Oman: a phenomenon in the making

Once abandoned for more than three decades, vernacular settlements in Oman are now being progressively reinvested in to foster the country’s heritage tourism sector. The present research focuses on the emerging phenomenon of community-led initiatives for vernacular heritage rehabilitation and adaptive reuse in Oman. Through an examination of three case studies, its aim is to describe this process and its modes of action and discuss its effects on vernacular settlement transformations. A mixed research methodology was designed to include (A) analyses of relevant primary and secondary data, (B) documented onsite observations, (C) interviews with local community representatives and key players in the operations of rehabilitation, and (D) extractions and analyses of quantitative data from a hotel booking website.The research sheds light on unsuspected interrelations within and between the projects being implemented in these settlements and their operating modes. It reveals the focal role of a local community in a kind of ‘bottom-up’ management of its built heritage, coupled with a ‘horizontal cooperation’ between the three initiatives studied in this research. Moreover, it shows that a heavily centralised and top-down policy for the field of heritage conservation and management is among the main obstacles that hinder such initiatives. Furthermore, community-led operations of vernacular heritage rehabilitation are being undertaken under insufficient regulations in terms of land use, building restoration and adaptive reuse. In this context, the paper discusses some of the serious threats and concerns faced by such initiatives and proposes actionable solutions to mitigate these hindrances.

TOURISM-RELATED URBAN REGENERATION OF HISTORIC CITIES: A REGENERATION STRATEGIES FOR KOCHI, KERALA

The process of reinducing life into decaying assets and developing future potential with the growing tourism of a historic city is known as tourism-related urban regeneration. The assets and potential for such heritage cities consist of built heritage, traditional industries, or cultural resources. The research is based on a study of a historic city in southern India called Kochi in Kerala state, which is famous for its built heritage, cultural evolution, and traditional economic industries. It is globally known for its historical spice trade. However, at present these assets are degenerating due to their low interest in public participation in conservation and regeneration. From the 12th to 17th century, the city Kochi (Cochin-Travancore) achieved global prosperity because of its sea-trade route, linkages with major continents, political patronage, and its existing natural resources. After independence, the city growth gets affected by inadequate development policies and low participation. With the passage of time, the city retained the built heritage and multi-shaded culture with its historical settlement patterns. The city today has shown a strong potential for tourism as there are plenty of heritage buildings, heritage settlements, and the traditional culture of the region. The city’s socio-economy is dominated by traditional industries of skilled craftsmanship and service providers. But at present, this traditional economic potential and cultural heritage of the city are struggling to grow with maximum potential due to the high rate of urbanization and participation failure. Therefore, the research looks into the city’s assets and its economic turbulence that could be a potential for the tourism-related urban regeneration of the region.