Local People’s Participation in Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management

Public participation in cultural heritage, with particular regard to conservation, has been a concern ever since the Venice Charter, and it still is to this day. This approach has also been highlighted in World Heritage documents. The Faro Convention adopted a shift in focus from the conservation of cultural heritage values to the value of cultural heritage for society. Accordingly, cultural heritage institutions inevitably have to apply a participatory approach in order to achieve sustainable conservation. Moreover, a number of papers have focused on the importance of public participation in heritage conservation and tourism management. This chapter studies the concept of people’s participation in cultural heritage conservation and management in international charters and documents. It also takes into account various methods and approaches in Human-Computer Interaction studies, which have valuable resources for user engagement in designing services by people for people, in order to propose an effective, applicable people-participation approach to cultural heritage management.