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Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts, to digitally mediated interactions like the ones happening on social media platforms. Citizen curation is proposed in the context of the European project SPICE - Social Participation, Cohesion, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement - as a methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people’s responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating users and memory institutions to reflect upon them. We argue that citizen curation urges to rethink the nature of computational infrastructures supporting data management of memory institutions, bringing novel challenges that include issues of distribution, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, and rights management. To approach these issues, we survey relevant literature towards a distributed, Linked Data infrastructure, with a focus on identifying the roles and requirements involved in such an infrastructure. We show how existing research can contribute significantly in facing the challenges raised by citizen curation, and discuss challenges and opportunities from the socio-technical standpoint.

Almost a century ago Modernism challenged the structure of the city and reshaped its physical space in order to, amongst other things, accommodate new transportation infrastructure and road networks proclaiming the, nowadays much-debated ‘scientificated’ pursuit of efficiency for the city. This transformation has had a great impact on the way humans still design, move in, occupy and experience the city. Today major cities in Europe, such as Paris and London, are considering banning vehicles from their historic centers. In parallel, significant effort is currently underway internationally by designers, architects, and engineers to integrate innovative technologies and sophisticated solutions for energy production, management, and storage, as well as for efficient energy consumption, into the architecture of buildings. In general, this effort seeks for new technologies and design methods (e.g., DesignBuilder with EnergyPlus simulation engine; Rhicoceros3D with Grasshopper plugin and Ecotect, Radiance and EnergyPlus tools) that would enable a holistic approach to the spatial design of Near-Zero Energy buildings, so that their ecological benefits are an added value to the architectural design and a building’s visual, and material, impact on its surrounding space. The paper inquires how the integration of such technological infrastructure and performance-orientated interfaces changes yet again the structure and form of cities, and to what extent it safeguards social rights and enables equal access to common resources. Drawing from preliminary results and initial considerations of ongoing research that involve the construction of four innovative NZE settlements across Europe, in the context of the EU-funded ZERO-PLUS project, this paper discusses the integration of novel infrastructure in communal spaces of these settlements. In doing so, it contributes to the debate about smart communities and their role in the sustainable management of housing developments and settlements that are designed and developed with the concept of smart territories.

Abstract Contemporary discourse points to the central role that heritage plays in the process of enabling groups of various cultural or ethnic background to strengthen their feeling of belonging and sharing in society. Safeguarding heritage is also valued highly in the priorities of the European Commission. As a result, there have been several long-term initiatives involving the digitisation, annotation and cataloguing of tangible cultural heritage in museums and collections. Specifically, for built heritage, a pressing challenge is that historical monuments such as buildings, temples, churches or city fortification infrastructures are hard to document due to their historic palimpsest; spatial transformations, actions of destruction, reuse of material, or continuous urban development that covers traces and changes the formal integrity and identity of a cultural heritage site. The ability to reason about a monument’s form is crucial for efficient documentation and cataloguing. This paper presents a 3D digitisation workflow through the involvement of reality capture technologies for the annotation and structure analysis of built heritage with the use of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) for classification purposes. The presented workflow contributes a new approach to the identification of a building’s architectural components (e.g., arch, dome) and to the study of the stylistic influences (e.g., Gothic, Byzantine) of building parts. In doing so this workflow can assist in tracking a building’s history, identifying its construction period and comparing it to other buildings of the same period. This process can contribute to educational and research activities, as well as facilitate the automated classification of datasets in digital repositories for scholarly research in digital humanities.