Smart Heritage as a Design Tool

Abstract

Smart Heritage enables urban designers and planners to reimagine historical narratives within cities through the untethered perspectives of smart technology. Smart Heritage is the convergence between the smart city and heritage disciplines that intertwines the autonomous and automatic capabilities and innovation of smart technologies with the contextual and subjective interpretation of the past. It is an emergent and distinct discourse in the academic literature that positions technology as the leadcurator of historical narratives. It is comparable with similar smart discourses, such as Smart Mobility and Smart Infrastructure, and contrasts with the human-led and archival focused Digital Heritage discourse. Through Smart Heritage, urban designers and planners are not physically, intellectually, and locationally limited in retelling and deploying culturally and socially powerful historical narratives. Instead, experts can draw online and personal data to produce powerful and novel experiences in cities. This article introduces Smart Heritage as a tool for urban designers and planners. It discusses how Smart Heritage can reimagine historical narratives within cities.