This study focuses on the role of controversies in heritage management, considering more specifically cities characterized by tensions between community groups. In such cities, the regulatory and institutional systems are challenged by highly structured community-based initiatives and organizations. Using an analytical framework that assesses the regulatory system, urban conservation, and development practices, we compared two heritage management projects in Tripoli (Lebanon). Our results highlight the dichotomy between decision makers' and communities' approaches to the definition and management of heritage and to the struggle over the use of public spaces to reclaim heritage values. The discussion highlights how controversies emerge from the physical assets that are claimed as heritage, the range of values associated with tangible assets, and how local communities may coproduce heritage knowledge and actively contribute to the democratization of heritage values.

Crowdsourcing is today a revolutionary phenomenon changing profoundly our ways of communicating and producing. In the last few years, Crowdsourcing has known important media coverage, especially regarding its role in recent international events like the post-earthquake Haiti rescue efforts in 2010 1 and the "Arab Spring" in 2011 2 . However, crowdsourcing is becoming more ubiquitous and is mobilized in a large number of fields. This includes new practices of design based on calls for propositions and ideas from the "crowd" 3 , new modes of reporting, live and from the scene of action through social media, the development of a new more qualitative cartographic tradition based on data produced individually and voluntarily by users, and a better management of catastrophic situations by putting at the disposition of citizen and institutions bottom--up produced information that could have crucial importance during and after the crisis 4 . Crowdsourcing is clearly empowering for citizens. More dramatically, crowdsourcing is today empowering citizens to step in two arenas where he has long been marginalized: science and politics. Despite harsh critiques addressed to these arenas as elitist, they are still ontologically built as spaces of expertise where a layperson does not have his place. It is true that, for some decades now, practices of citizen science and citizen participation have brought the citizen into the "sacred" spaces of the laboratory and the government council. However, he remains in a subordinate position in no way in control of the process. With crowdsourcing we can see a restructuration of the equilibrium set between scientists', public authorities' and citizens' powers at the founding moments of the modern project. Crowdsourcing allows citizens to "produce" Nature and Society out of laboratories and government councils and without waiting the initiative - or even the consent -of scientists and politicians. Regarding this profound undergoing revolution this article is interested in two issues. On one hand, it investigates the forms and limits of crowdsourcing--related citizen empowerment. It is less concerned by the now recognized fact that crowdsourcing is empowering, but rather focuses on the ways it does so and the architecture of the relations between citizens, scientists and institutions in this new context. On the other, it discusses the question of credibility of data produced through crowdsourcing. This question represents, in fact, the Achilles' heel that destabilizes the rise of citizen power in the face of experts and institutions. In its discussion of these two issues, the article relies on a particularly

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract