In the past three decades, there has been increasing research carried out on the role of heritage and its processes in achieving broader sustainable development objectives beyond heritage conservation. As part of this movement, people-centered approaches and participation have been widely integrated into international regulations and guidelines on heritage management, stimulating the implementation of case studies-based research worldwide. Despite the wide advocacy of participatory heritage practices’ contributions to more inclusive and culturally sensitive local development in a great variety of projects, there is limited research into the roles these practices can have in addressing sustainability objectives. How are these roles addressed in international heritage regulatory frameworks, and what forms of participation are promoted for their fulfillment? This paper seeks to answer this research question through a content analysis of international declarations, conventions, guidelines, and policy documents focused on the roles and forms of participation that are promoted. A crossed-matched analysis of results reveals that active forms of participation are those most used to promote all roles and subcategories of participation, as a right, as a driver, and as an enabler of sustainable development. However, fewer active forms are presented as complementary at different stages of sustainability-oriented heritage practices. Moreover, a higher incidence of generic forms of participation can be observed in documents addressing international stakeholders, while partnership and intervention are to be found in those targeting regional and local actors. Nevertheless, the low incidence of decisional forms of participation confirms the challenges of power-sharing at all scales. Trends and influences are highlighted, informing heritage research, governance, and policymaking, but also revealing gaps and ambiguities in current regulations that further research encompassing a larger number of documents might confirm.

In the context of low-cost video encoding, distributed video coding (DVC) has recently emerged as a potential candidate for uplink-oriented applications. This paper builds on a concept of correlation channel (CC) modeling, which expresses the correlation noise as being statistically dependent on the side information (SI). Compared with classical side-information-independent (SII) noise modeling adopted in current DVC solutions, it is theoretically proven that side-information-dependent (SID) modeling improves the Wyner-Ziv coding performance. Anchored in this finding, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for online estimation of the SID CC parameters based on already decoded information. The proposed algorithm enables bit-plane-by-bit-plane successive refinement of the channel estimation leading to progressively improved accuracy. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is included in a novel DVC architecture that employs a competitive hash-based motion estimation technique to generate high-quality SI at the decoder. Experimental results corroborate our theoretical gains and validate the accuracy of the channel estimation algorithm. The performance assessment of the proposed architecture shows remarkable and consistent coding gains over a germane group of state-of-the-art distributed and standard video codecs, even under strenuous conditions, i.e., large groups of pictures and highly irregular motion content.

In contrast to traditional predictive coding, Wyner-Ziv video coding enables low-cost encoding architectures, in which the computationally expensive tasks for performing motion estimation are shifted to the decoder-side. In Wyner-Ziv video coding, side-information generation is a key aspect profoundly affecting the compression capacity of the system. This paper presents a novel technique which enables side-information refinement after DC coefficient band decoding in a transform-domain Wyner-Ziv video codec. The proposed side-information refinement approach performs overlapped block motion estimation and compensation, utilizing multi-hypothesis pixel-based prediction. The experimental results show that the presented Wyner-Ziv video codec incorporating the proposed technique yields significant and systematic compression gains of up to 23.22% with respect to the state-of-the-art DISCOVER codec.

Harald DECEULAER, Marc JACOBS Droits, devoirs et conflits dans les quartiers de Gand (XVIIe-XVIIIesiècles) Cet article étudie les relations entre le Magistrat et les organisations de voisinage à Gand aux XVIIeet XVIIIesiècles. La première partie présente une micro-histoire des relations et des échanges de capital social, économique et symbolique dans un quartier spécifique, fondée sur une source exceptionnelle. La seconde partie examine les relations entre la vie de quartier et la gestion municipale. L’article souligne le processus de négociation et d’appropriation mutuelle entre ville et quartier, et décrit la participation active et sélective des voisinages dans la formation de la politique locale concernant l’aménagement urbain, le maintien de l’ordre, la politique sociale et le règlement des conflits. L’influence des voisinages dans ces domaines était liée à leur rôle financier, un rôle qui devenait plus important quand les revenus fiscaux de la ville diminuaient (la deuxième moitié du XVIIesiècle), que dans des périodes de prospérité relative.