Built heritage, together with the surrounding public space, acts as common resource, and plays a vital role in the liveability of our cities, supporting the achievement of collective goals through a sense of co-existence. Heritage-scapes embody multiple dimensions (e.g., sociocultural, historical, architectural), which can be interpreted through the values that people interacting with them assign to space, as well as the multiple stories and the body of past and current narratives that enrich them. Many of these places have now lost their role as central topoi of socialization due to the transformation of people’s interaction opportunities at the metropolitan landscape, and largely at the global scale of digital environments (social networks, etc.). Individual and collective narratives associated with these places are assets, i.e., resources, which when managed well can help activate the public realm.

The lack of inclusion, interaction and engagement among the various communities that share the built environment often lead to the establishment of a hegemonic techno-social understanding of the urban space which can hardly address the complex structure of our cities, while it compresses diversity and limits the agency of their inhabitants. This is arguably one of the most pressing challenges of Europe, one that calls for creating new opportunities for multi-stakeholder dialogue.

The colloquium will discuss how we can drive urban transitions by means of practices that engage city inhabitants in regeneration efforts, by relying on heritage values and narratives to reinforce connections with the environment and within the community. New digital methods can help us re-discover the positive impact that social and ecological integration of historical neighbourhoods, and architectural heritage of the recent past, can have on our well-being in a city. Digital tools can be used not only for top-down operations of urban monitoring through sensor networks – typical in smart city applications, but also to strengthen multi-stakeholder dialogue and offer new opportunities for the city authorities to understand responsively citizen-volunteered data that will help managing better the built environment in a more inclusive way.

Dr Georgios Artopoulos is an Associate Professor at The Cyprus Institute, where he works on immersive and virtual environments, urban modelling and digital simulation for the study of built heritage and the creative exploration of historical narratives. Georgios holds a Master of Philosophy and a PhD, University of Cambridge (UK) with a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together with the team of Virtual Environments Lab, at the CyI, Georgios is developing ICT-enabled user-driven tools for social resilience and inclusion, with an application in historical context.

The social aspects of historic space and the cross-disciplinary nature of the pressing challenges facing our cities are explored through the externally funded projects he is contributing to or coordinating (under Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, ENI-CBC-MED, and the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation frameworks), his role as a co-Head of Virtual Competency Centre e-Infrastructure of the DARIAH ERIC, and as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of JPI Urban Europe, where he works on matters of sustainable and liveable cities and urban areas. His work was presented in the International Exhibition Computational Turn in Architecture, MAV, Marseille; Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017; Hong Kong and Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism; 63rd Venice Film Festival, La Biennale di Venezia; Royal Institute of British Architects, London; London Design Festival; Festival of Architecture 2018, Israel; the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.