Cultural Heritage and the Digital Age

Abstract

While it is true that historical centers have undergone a great transformation since the 1960s, it is no less true that there is still a distance between the cultural heritage of cities and the population. The area surrounding the heritage seems to be wrapped in an "intellectual" halo completely away from the citizen that is often not able to feel part of its wealth. On the other hand, nowadays, the relationship between us and the historical centers is affecting them badly due to the waves of tourists that accelerate the phenomenon of gentrification and pious the inhabitants thereof to other areas of the city. How can we reverse all this, bring heritage closer to citizens and raise awareness about the importance of caring for our historic centers?

For the preparation of this study, bibliography related to concepts such as cultural heritage, dissemination, technological advances, anthropology and architecture has been consulted. Another tool used for the development of this article has been the internet, online specialized magazines, related articles and university papers that share study themes.

The data used are the results of the studies found in the methodology section.

The advances linked to the different industrial revolutions that have been taking place since the SXIX have led to a change that goes far beyond the production systems or the materiality itself. Nowadays, in fields such as art or architecture, the interaction of the work with the individual is increasingly explored. In architecture, practices such as cohausing, cooperatives or inclusive urban planning that uses citizen platforms such as Consul to generate a rapprochement between citizens and architecture are being multiplied. The digital revolution, the rise of open source or technological advances are some of the key concepts to understand this phenomenon. But how is all this affecting heritage? On the other hand, as French critic and historian Françoise Choay expresses perfectly in her Allegory of Heritage, the change produced in the middle of the last century that completely transformed the concept of cultural heritage is closely related to the way we understand the spaces. Continuing with this reasoning, it is worth asking how the term space has changed and what does it refer to right now, does the definition given in the 1960s still apply? Do we continue to conceive of the spaces as we did before? The emergence and rapid development of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality is giving a total change to the way we live and understand spaces. Apparently innocent games like Pokémon Go or applications like Geocaching are making us relate to cities and architecture in a whole new way, opening the way to countless possibilities and opportunities.

New technologies have greatly affected the way we understand architecture today. As users, we feel much closer to the transformations that occur in our cities, we have totally changed the way we relate to spaces and there are new non-physical connections that link us with other users and allow us to have a voice on the changes and on the final decisions. Within the field of architecture these transformations occur more slowly in heritage, although there are very interesting initiatives that are striving to bring technologies to historic centers. We have analyzed them based on three characteristics that we believe are fundamental to arrive at an optimal solution to the problem we are facing. These are: the possibility of generating an experience that links the user with Heritage, their ability to generate a community and how are the relationships between members and, finally, the ability to adapt its content to the general public.

Betting on the dissemination of heritage using a closer language, the use of new and current techniques based on both new methodologies (such as m-learning), digital tools and promoting citizen participation are key actions to face the problems characteristic of our historical centers. The citizens are the one who has the key to save our city centers, we need to democratize the heritage. Only by feeling part of something will we be able to fully engage in their care and preservation.