Novel Technologies as Potential Catalyst for Democratizing Urban Heritage Preservation Practices: The Case of 3D Scanning and AI

The conflict between heritage protection and urban infrastructure development rationales creates a context for inclusion, participation and dialogue of different heritage-related communities. However, developed in the pre-computer age of administrative practice, are often incapable, partially or completely, to accommodate the ‘new-era’ community oriented participatory practices. In this article, authors discuss the mutual effects of IT in the process of democratization of urban heritage preservation. The authors create and argue the conceptual model of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in participatory UHP. The model demonstrates how technologies can become catalysts for democratization in situations when the regulatory and administrative change (on its own) is too inert. The article hypothesizes that novel technological developments which aim at or have the potential for increasing community involvement and democratization of administrative practice, exert their effects directly through technology-based participatory practices.