A Place for Cultural Heritage in Smart Cities
Urban heritage, including its tangible and intangible components, constitutes a key resource in enhancing the liveability of urban areas, and fosters economic development and social cohesion in a changing global environment. — UNESCO, Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape
In the past decades, many historic European urban centres have undergone a transformation due to urban growth, with over 240 medium and large-sized cities pursuing Smart City objectives and implementing Smart City programmes (Euractiv 2017) in order to make urban life more liveable and more sustainable. In most people’s minds, the concept of a ‘Smart City’ notably includes information and communication technology (ICT), as well as a variety of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) network to improve city operations and services.
However, improving the quality of life can’t only be reduced to technology: culture and heritage will remain crucial to shaping the future of society even as new technology drives city infrastructure development.
‘Living Cities’ and Urban Culture
The Smart City is human before being technological. — Carlos Moreno
The Franco-Colombian scientist and university professor Carlos Moreno opposes this simplified concept of the Smart City as an over-connected and dehumanised space with what he calls the ‘living city’.
While recognising the importance of digital tools in the design of cities, he criticises the techno-centric and universalist perspectives which erase the place of the living and its interactions, generating “dead cities”. In contrast, ‘Living cities’ foster relationships and exchanges in order to generate new ideas and practices. It is based on metabolic exchanges and citizen re-appropriation, rather than on the verticality of technology or architecture.
Many people have been talking about the smart urban city with sensor technology — I worked for several years with this technology because my first discipline is mathematics and computer science — but I consider that today, the real solution is to make happy citizens, not smart citizens. — Carlos Moreno
In Moreno’s ‘15-minute city’ model, which aims at offering access within 15 minutes to all necessities, developing a new urban culture to reconcile urban dwellers with their location is an essential step to reorganising our presence in urban space.
Culture and heritage are to this extent crucial components of a living, dynamic, and healthy city that may take advantage of innovation in its development.
When Heritage and Technology meet
Access to heritage can thus play a crucial role in the “intelligence” of a city. For it to be “smart”, technological innovation must contribute to improving the quality of life of citizens. And to provide a better understanding of the world today, the relationship between citizens and the vestiges they have left behind must be cultivated.
What role can technology play regarding urban heritage? We can think for example of digital heritage mediation, as it was implemented in the cities of Soest, Germany in 2019 and Saint-Imier, Switzerland in 2021. In both cities, tourists but also citizens can access the past with their smartphones, through Augmented Reality and 3D Modelling.
With interactive content such as texts, pictures, videos, audio or quizzes, visitors can experience the cultural heritage of the cities beyond what a brochure can offer. This concept of a digital city tour can be replicated in other cities and municipalities and thus make old places experienceable in a new way.
Furthermore, Smart Mobility solutions can also partake in reconciling modern times with their heritage. In 2020, a unique cycling concept was developped in Zagreb, Croatia which rewards cyclists who visit seven important locations of cultural and natural heritage sights.
Karslruhe: A Case in Point
In 2020, researchers Margarita Angelidou and Efstratios Stylianidis have published an update on their paper “Cultural Heritage in Smart Cities Environments”, in which they analyse, among others, the Smart City initiative of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.
In Karlsruhe, cultural heritage is treated as an developmental priority in itself, which can be supported and augmented by Smart City applications such as the Stadtgeist application, which brings images, stories and other content of the past from the city archives to the present, or the ‘Karlsruhe VR’ app, which provides users with 360° views of important buildings and landmarks in the city.
There is now a clear trend towards more mature and integrated smart city approaches which tie closely cultural heritage both with the history of a city and its strategic goal to promote tourism. From this viewpoint, it could be argued that we are in front of a new generation of smart city initiatives in which cultural heritage is of increasing importance. In this new generation, cultural heritage is a key pillar of social and cultural values, liveability and sustainable urban development. — Angelidou & Stylianidis
Key to these successful implementations is the leveraging of the capabilities of the academic and private sector in the co-design of those applications, given that these actors bring in enabling knowledge, competences and technologies that could not be otherwise accessed by the cities themselves.
Despite the existence of different integration routes of local cultural heritage in smart city strategies, either as tourism asset, component of quality of life, or substantial element of public services for citizens and visitors, cultural heritage as an objective was only fragmentarily addressed within smart city strategies. This represented a missed opportunity to use cultural heritage as a reference point for local innovation; to cultivate vibrant and intelligent communities around cultural heritage; to attract investment in and for cultural heritage; and overall, to improve liveability and socio-economic prosperity by successfully incorporating cultural heritage as a key asset of the smart city. — Angelidou & Stylianidis
To conclude, there should be a place for cultural heritage in Smart Cities. Smart heritage connects a physical reality to a virtual reality, and offers a broad range of possibilities to access its representations. Not only does it connects us with our past, but it generates citizen engagement and favorises intergenerational interactions, it fosters smart and sustainable tourism, as well as a economic development, and overall partake in making our cities more livable and more resilient.
Want to read more about Smart City implementations? Find them on the BABLE platform!
Make sure to also take a look at our other Medium articles, and always feel free to reach out to us for any inquiry.
