Global citizens and world heritage: Social inclusion of online communities in heritage planning

Social inclusion has grown as an important goal for heritage planning over the past decades. Whilst the document Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape called a decade ago for novel tools for civic engagement and knowledge documentation, social media already functions as a platform for online communities to actively get involved in heritage-related activities by sharing their ideas. Especially when radical events occur around heritage properties, either positive or negative, emotions and opinions would spread rapidly across the globe via the internet to reach online communities of interested or concerned citizens. This paper presents a theoretical framework defined to classify social inclusion of online communities in heritage planning processes through differentiating the everyday baseline scenarios from the event-triggered activated ones. A preliminary systematic literature review shows that research integrating and comparing both scenarios is still scarce, and that specific tools and algorithms to handle large datasets are needed to identify the structure of communication networks underpinning the spread of information on social media. This framework is the first step on future research to investigate the different focal attention points, mechanisms, and patterns of social inclusion of online communities in heritage planning, towards transforming it to a more socially inclusive practice.