Museum

International

U
Urban life and museums

Vol LVIII, n°3 / 231, September 2006

Editorial
The advantage of an institutional journal such as MUSEUM International is that,
in keeping with its mission of disseminating knowledge, it can provide its professional
partners with a visible space of expression and help circulate their expertise whenever they
contribute to a better understanding of a subject of global relevance.

The relationship of museum and city is indeed an overarching subject for the international
community of heritage. Cities can no longer be considered in a restrictive sense as places
where symbolic expressions of political powers can expand – museums being only one of
these symbolic cultural expressions. Cities’ internal changes, whether they be cultural,
political or social, are major subjects of museums’ concern and action. Museum
professionals are thus confronted with two categories of questions: those which relate to
the programming of the museum in the city and those that partake in defining a museology
that represents the city.

In this context, the creation of the International Committee of ICOM of Museums of

Cities (CAMOC) and the start of its intellectual and professional work were most welcome.
This issue of MUSEUM International on ‘‘Urban Life and Museums’’ presents most of
the papers of the CAMOC International seminar held in Boston last May. They
combine theoretical approaches and practical examples from various fields and cultural
backgrounds.

I wish to thank Ian Jones, the dedicated Secretary of CAMOC, who spared no effort to
ensure the publication of the papers presented at the international seminar in UNESCO’s
journal.

Isabelle Vinson

4 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) ª UNESCO 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 Editorial

U
ntil the beginning of the twenty-first century the character of human
habitation had been historically rural. While most humans have
traditionally lived in sparsely settled, rural villages, the human quest for
learning, knowledge, and the civilizing pursuits of art, literature, and
music have been primarily advanced in densely concentrated, urban communities.
For the past two centuries the population of these urban settlements has expanded
dramatically into megalopolises that will soon overtake the rural areas as home to the
majority of the world’s 6 billion human beings.

The historic dominance of cities as wellsprings of intellectual, cultural, political

and economic energy and their recent extraordinary population growth have made it
imperative for the contemporary world to have an understanding and appreciation of a
city’s past, present, and possible futures. The recognition of this need has led to the
creation and expansion of museums about cities throughout the world and the
formation of an International Committee of the International Council of Museums
(ICOM) to serve this growing city museum community. The International
Committee for Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC, http://
www.camoc.icom.museum), the thirtieth international committee of ICOM, was
established in April 2005 at a meeting in Moscow hosted by the director general of the
Moscow City Museum, Mrs Galina Vedernikova,. The creation of CAMOC achieved a
scheme that was set in motion at a meeting at the Museum of London in 1993.
Subsequent gatherings of museums of cities’ professionals in Barcelona and
Luxembourg led to the formalization of the forum as part of ICOM.

The ‘‘museums of cities movement’’ that spawned CAMOC is found on every

continent. In Europe the Museum of London has embarked on a £18 million
‘‘Capital City Project’’ that will increase the museum’s gallery spaces by 25%. In Latin
America the city of São Paulo, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities with a
population of 17.9 million, is creating its city museum in the historic Casa Da
Marquesa de Santos. In Asia the movement is represented in the recently opened
$150 million Capital Museum in Beijing. In the United States the Chicago Historical
Society is celebrating its 150th anniversary by changing its name to The Chicago
History Museum and spending $27.5 million in renovating and enlarging its exhibition
galleries. San Francisco, Tampa Bay, and Atlanta have recently announced plans to
either create or expand their city museums. Noteworthy among these efforts is the
Boston Museum Project with the goal of creating a $100 million museum about one of
America’s most historic and dynamic cities.

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 5

Editorial

It was therefore fitting that Boston was the setting for the CAMOC’s inaugural
conference, ‘‘Museums of cities: gateways to understanding urban life’’. For three days,
30 April–2 May, 2006, seventy-five delegates from 15 countries heard thirty-one
presentations on topics ranging from serving increasingly diverse audiences to the
latest technologies in presenting urban history. The gathering of museum professionals,
urban historians, exhibition designers and museum specialists was an informative and
stimulating exchange of ideas led by speakers representing museums of cities from
Kazan to London, from Melbourne to Copenhagen, from Montreal to São Paulo, and
from Moscow to Philadelphia. Conference delegates found common ground in the
challenges and opportunities inherent in having a city as your subject and urban
dwellers as your audience. Emerging from the papers and discussions was a consensus
that museums of cities are not solely about the past, but deal with contemporary urban
life as well as providing an important context in which to contemplate and plan a city’s
future.

Although museums of cities are by their very nature tied to place, they share
much in common as the world’s population urbanizes. By connecting with their
international colleagues through such organizations as CAMOC, city museum
professionals, historians of cities, city planners and those involved in the exploration
and interpretation of urban life will enhance their ability to advance the missions of
museums of cities as sources of knowledge and inspiration for their audiences. This is
CAMOC’s charge. The publications of papers presented at CAMOC’s Boston
Conference by Museum International advances that commitment.

Robert R. Macdonald
V ICE C HAIR , CAMOC,
D IRECTOR E MERITUS , M USEUM OF THE C ITY OF N EW Y ORK

6 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
Editorial
The advantage of an institutional journal such as MUSEUM International is that,
in keeping with its mission of disseminating knowledge, it can provide its professional
partners with a visible space of expression and help circulate their expertise whenever they
contribute to a better understanding of a subject of global relevance.

The relationship of museum and city is indeed an overarching subject for the international
community of heritage. Cities can no longer be considered in a restrictive sense as places
where symbolic expressions of political powers can expand – museums being only one of
these symbolic cultural expressions. Cities’ internal changes, whether they be cultural,
political or social, are major subjects of museums’ concern and action. Museum
professionals are thus confronted with two categories of questions: those which relate to
the programming of the museum in the city and those that partake in defining a museology
that represents the city.

In this context, the creation of the International Committee of ICOM of Museums of

Cities (CAMOC) and the start of its intellectual and professional work were most welcome.
This issue of MUSEUM International on ‘‘Urban Life and Museums’’ presents most of
the papers of the CAMOC International seminar held in Boston last May. They
combine theoretical approaches and practical examples from various fields and cultural
backgrounds.

I wish to thank Ian Jones, the dedicated Secretary of CAMOC, who spared no effort to
ensure the publication of the papers presented at the international seminar in UNESCO’s
journal.

Isabelle Vinson

4 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) ª UNESCO 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 ª Marina TAURUS

1
1. Art expressions in the city. Wall painting, rue d’Alleray, Paris. ª «H. Di Rosa», 2000.

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 7

 Real places in a Virtual World
by Robert R. Archibald

Since 1988, Robert Archibald has served as president and CEO of the Missouri Historical
Society in St Louis, Missouri, USA. He headed the Museums and Community initiative for the
American Association of Museums and also serves as president of the National Council of
the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. He is the author of The New Town Square: Museums and
Communities in Transition, published in 2004, and A Place to Remember: Using History to
Build Community.

It is a perfect April St Louis Saturday morning. The

native redbud trees trimmed in rosy magenta have
peaked. The dogwood trees sport white cup-
shaped yellow-centred flowers. In the parks these
trees form a white and rose under-storey beneath
the huge oaks and hickories that have not yet
leafed. It will be eighty degrees today but without
dreaded drenching summer humidity. I meet Rama
Lakshmi at the visitors’ services desk of the
Missouri History Museum. For fifteen years Rama
has been a Washington Post reporter based in her
native New Delhi, but for now she has set that
world aside and become instead a student pursuing
a Master’s degree in museum studies from the
University of Missouri–St Louis. Today I am taking
her on a tour of St Louis. I look forward to the day,
but I will be caught absolutely unawares by the
richness of what is about to happen. While Rama
Lakshmi explores St Louis, I explore New Delhi.

Neither history nor culture is a museum.

What we collect and exhibit is but a small sample
of reminders of where we live. The bigger museum,
the main stage, is here on the streets, enclosed in
buildings, encoded in memory and encased in the
repeated stories of grandmothers and grandfathers.
Rama and I drive to a fascinating section of the
city, and I park in front of Sumner High School. It

8 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) ª UNESCO 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

is a huge old school that architecturally testifies
to the importance of the educational enterprise
within. The grand façade, the parapets, the solid
reddish brick walls loudly proclaim that this is an
important place where important things happen.
But this school, and the nearby building that was
the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, are edifices of
segregation, centres of African-American
excellence and persistence in a racially segregated
world. The hospital buildings, abandoned in the
1970s, are now condominiums. Sumner High is
still open but instead of excellence it now
symbolizes the failure of urban education. Rama
mentions the caste system in India, and our
conversation turns to parallels and distinctions
between racism and poverty in America and the
persistence of castes in her home country and the
silence and impoverishment of Dalits, India’s
outcasts, the untouchables.
The Homer G. Phillips Hospital and
Sumner High School are in St Louis’s Ville
neighbourhood. While African Americans living in
St Louis are aware of the place and its history, the
majority of white St Louisans are not. It is one of
too many unshared histories in our region. The
result is a profound lack of common understanding
of our shared place and a paucity of common
aspirations for our future. A few weeks ago, The
Times of India printed an editorial piece by Rama
Lakshmi. ‘Many,’ she wrote, ‘believe that the
biggest social cleavage in India is not religion or
gender, but caste. Despite progressive
constitutional guarantees and the abolition of
untouchability, discrimination continues. A caste
museum is one way of confronting the existence
of a parallel narrative (of Dalits) that has remained
invisible from mainstream historiography.’ One of
Real places in a Virtual World
Robert R. Archibald
Rama’s incentives in entering the museum studies
programme was the concept of such a museum.
We drive a mile or two from the Ville, and
I stop the car near the intersection of Jefferson and
Olive Streets. There is a nondescript building on
the south-west corner. The odd little building
typifies the vernacular architecture of the 1950s, a
style that does not respect its environment but
rather ignores everything around it, an ugly knock-
off of the International style. But it is an important
place because of the Jefferson Bank protests that
took place here in 1967 and ultimately pressurized
St Louis businesses to employ more African
Americans. Despite ferocious rhetoric and red-
faced anger all round, the long protest was non-
violent and in the end successful. Rama had visited
the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr Center in
Atlanta a few weeks earlier. Our conversation turns
to Gandhi and non-violent struggles for justice and
freedom from oppression in other places at other
times.
The first great east–west ‘mother road’ of
the United States, Route 66, passed through St
Louis on two-lane concrete between its start in
Chicago and its finish in Santa Monica, California.
This road, enshrined in romantic nostalgia, was
America’s first transcontinental road that did not
zig around farmhouses and zag at every country
corner. It crossed the Mississippi River on the ‘Old
Chain of Rocks Bridge’, just north of downtown St
Louis. The bridge is aptly named. There is a chain
of rocks just below the bridge that creates
treacherous rapids. Towboats and barges bypass
here through a series of locks and dams. The
Mississippi is big and powerful here, fortified a few
miles upstream by its confluence with the
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 9
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
Missouri. T. S. Eliot called the Mississippi at St
Louis ‘a strong brown god’.
The Chain of Rocks bridge is no longer a
road for automobiles. It is now part of a regional
trail system for walkers and bikers. We slowly walk
out on the bridge to the midpoint. The river is a
muddy brown. Huge trees carried downstream by
the river pile up like twigs against the upriver sides
of the grey, rust-stained bridge piers. The river
does not flow placidly and smoothly, but instead
the surface reflects deep turbulence in abundant
whorls, vortices and gigantic swirls. It is an
awesome display of power that overwhelms human
hubris and requires respect. My companion
compares it to the Ganges. ‘On the banks of the
Ganges,’ she says, ‘people crowd the riverbanks.
Hindus make pilgrimages to the holy river to
bathe, scatter human ashes and burn corpses.
Chemicals and untreated sewerage are dumped in
the river.’ The Mississippi, too, is polluted with
chemical and human waste. We humans have done
this. How can we re-imagine our relationship with
the earth so that our children inherit a world that
can sustain lives worth living?
How we imagine our place in the world
determines how we will treat the earth and each
other. If we think of the planet as a basket of
resources for our consumption, we behave in
predictable ways. If we believe that places are
sacred, we behave quite differently. How must we
think differently about water and air so as to
ensure that there are plenty of both of good
quality? What values and what kind of community
arrangements are most conducive to healthy places
for people? Can we reach a level of common
agreements on the attributes of good places that
10 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
permits us to proceed? Rivers are good places to
think about these things.
Cities are built by immigrants who come
from the other side of the planet and the other side
of the river. St Louis still has black sororities,
Polish Falcons, bocce clubs, and Turnvereine. They
are reminders of the transitions that all newcomers
make as they seek accommodation to urban life in
a new place. All first-generation immigrants are
suspended between former places that they cannot
quite leave behind and new places that they cannot
quite fully adopt. Many collections in my own
institution reflect the ethnic origins of people who
came to St Louis and their sometimes wrenching
efforts to adapt to a new place that was often
inhospitable. The rusted shackles, narratives of
slavery, and terrifying white robes of the Ku Klux
Klan document the extreme. Treasured
photographs of relatives and loved ones left behind
and upbeat letters with undertones of
homesickness are the more common. Immigrants
inundated St Louis in the nineteenth century.
Growth since then has been modest. Globally,
however, the story is different because urban
populations are expanding at huge rates.
I drive with Rama Lakshmi along streets
and blocks that were once solid rows of houses,
now just pockmarked with a few dilapidated
buildings and plenty of garbage strewn over vacant
lots. Because of the struggle for human rights by
Dalits in India, Rama is really interested in the
explosive brew of intergenerational poverty and
covert racism implicit in what we see. This uneasy
coexistence of poverty and wealth is echoed
everywhere. In autumn 2005 CNN bombarded
living-rooms with images of people stuck in this

unconscionable underclass huddled at the New
Orleans Superdome trying to escape the
floodwaters surging over the levies. Many
Americans reacted with shock, presuming that
New Orleans had a peculiar problem. The problem
is here on the streets of my city, and likely on your
streets too.
For three years I have served on the board
of the St Louis Public Schools as a member of a
board majority committed to securing better
outcomes for children. I see those angry faces of
the dispossessed at every school-board meeting.
Some line up behind the microphone to speak
during the public comment period. Their voices
are both pathetic and vitriolic. I know my
community well – the people behind the
microphone who sit on the dilapidated porches
and those who congregate at the St Louis Country
Club. Their worlds do not intersect. Rama and I
have more in common with each other than my
fellow St Louisans in the mansions on Upper
Barnes Road have in common with those who live
just a few miles away in ramshackle old houses on
Dr Martin Luther King Boulevard. We have no
common understandings of our place upon which
to base the future. This is an acidic stew of race and
class served up in large portions. Rama explains to
me how the caste system in India is based on
heredity, on who your people are. She has
understood the parallels in our disparate cultures.
How can we reconcile? How can we make shared
stories with common elements? Sometimes I
ponder on simple things like: How can we just
become aware of each other?
As we drive along the north side of St Louis
we pass block after block, street after street that
Real places in a Virtual World
Robert R. Archibald
appear as if bombs had fallen, grenades and
dynamite had exploded. Desolation is the accurate
noun. This is a land of prodigal waste. This is a
place of destruction – destruction of infrastructure
and abandonment of sewers, streets, sidewalks,
houses, stores, and schools. The process here is the
opposite of community building. This is the story
of somewhere becoming nowhere. Each home
demolition or arson is the destruction of a point of
attachment for someone’s memory. Every vacant
lot is a story forgotten. Community destruction
is a process of forgetting just as community
building is a process of creating shared memories.
This kind of community disintegration is also an
environmental débâcle. It is not just about
disinvestment. It is also about abandonment of
huge investments of capital and those non-
renewable resources consumed to build the place.
Later, we drive west to the suburbs. We
have not only abandoned the city at enormous cost
but we rebuilt on the periphery at equally
enormous cost in ways that require massive
consumption of even more non-renewable
resources. This kind of city cannot work. It is built
on automobiles, fossil fuels, and cheap land. This
kind of building is not good for us or for the earth.
It just may be that good places for people are also
good places for the planet and for the future. Good
places for people are places that conserve. Good
places allow us to build relationships. Good places
respect memory and continuity. Good places are
clean and healthy for us. Good places connect us to
each other, and to those who were here before us
and those who will come later.
Henry Ford discovered a century ago that if
every automobile that he built was absolutely
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 11
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
identical, then he could standardize the parts,
create an assembly line, hire workers who did just
one thing, and produce cheaper cars. That
principle now applies everywhere. It surely applies
to suburban housing. Suburbs in St Louis are
interchangeable with nearly every other suburban
development in proximity to every other American
city. It is not just the sameness of suburbs but
also the creeping sameness of culture in St Louis
and everywhere else. (Rama says she needs to get
back to India before it is all changed.) Old cities
reflect the passage of time, continuity between
generations; and they insist upon recall and
remembrance as a condition of living in them. We
humans require memory because it attaches us to
place and to each other. Memories are the raw
material of human identity. Shared remembrance is
the fundamental fabric of community.
There are three water towers in St Louis,
two of them on the north side. They are
architecturally distinct. There is a Corinthian
column that soars hundreds of feet straight up in
the middle of a traffic circle. Another is a soaring,
ornate Victorian monolith. Rama and I drive to the
column and park as close as we can. The water
tower is a spectacular architectural statement built
by the city’s waterworks department more than a
century ago. ‘The waterworks department?’ you
ask. Yes. In the late nineteenth century St Louis
was the fourth largest city in the United States. At
the time, people were working out how to build big
cities that offered a tolerable quality of life.
Plumbing, water mains, and sewers were crucial.
So how to take that brown soup out of the
Mississippi River and make it flow clearly and
consistently from taps was a major concern. Back
then water pumps were pistons. Water propelled
12 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
through pipes by pistons came through in spurts
that mimicked the back-and-forth movement of the
piston in the cylinder. The water towers were
gigantic shock-absorbers. Instead of letting the
water gush sporadically out of the taps, the pumps
pushed the water up and down in the towers. The
towers are now obsolete because non-oscillating
turbines pump the water. These spectacular towers
were, however, once a remarkable innovation, the
most modern technology of the time embedded in
a soaring Corinthian column.
A one-storey brick building on St Louis
Avenue in Old North St Louis has two doors in
front. The letters on the cornice above them read
‘City Bath House Number 6’. This was a public
bath house, one of many once operated by the city
and used by those who lived in tenements with no
indoor plumbing. Although motivated by intrusive
paternalism, the bath houses served a serious
public good, especially as the contagion of diseases
such as cholera were understood to be related to
sanitation. But the bath house is just one reminder
of an enormous commitment on the part of citizens
of my place, a hundred and more years ago, to
make provisions for the common good. This
commitment is exemplified not just in bath houses,
but in the dozens of parks around the city set aside
as urban oases, uplifting for both spirit and body;
in the public library system, given a number-one
rating in a recent study; in the imposing copper-
domed insane asylum, the Mariners’ Hospital down
by the Mississippi River, and the short-lived Social
Evil Hospital for the treatment of venereal diseases,
created as the centrepiece of a brief nineteenth-
century experiment with legalized prostitution.
The old segregated City Hospital and its long
delayed counterpart for African Americans, the

Homer G. Phillips Hospital, exemplify repellent
aspects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
life in my city, the blatant discrimination based on
race, class, gender, ethnic origin, and religion. It is
said that St Louis was a place of dirt and grime,
short painful lives, poor living standards. But in
the bath houses, public buildings, and parks is
evidence of a different understanding of the social
contract that I think we ought to heed as proof that
our current interpretations are just interpretations.
It could be different.
Until I moved to St Louis seventeen years
ago, I was a rural boy. I knew the craggy shores of
Lake Superior, the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range
of New Mexico, and the Rocky Mountain foothills
around Helena, Montana. Like a lot of rural people,
I was both attracted and frightened by cities. Rama
asks me why I moved to St Louis. I have thought
about this often. The primary reason is that the
future happens in cities. People work on their big
problems in cities. Our tour around St Louis is really
about how the future was worked out in the big
nineteenth-century immigrant industrial city.
A manufacturing building on North Grand
Avenue near Dodier is dull, dark red brick, and
huge. It is surrounded by acres of deteriorated
asphalt parking lots with dips and ridges and
ubiquitous weeds. This was the main factory for
the Carter Carburetor Corporation, once a primary
manufacturer of carburetors in the United States.
There are generations now who have no need to
know what a carburetor does. It mixes air and
gasoline before it is sucked into the cylinders of
internal combustion engines. Some of us recall the
exasperation of a ‘flooded engine’, chokes, misfires,
and stuck carburetor floats. The demise of
Real places in a Virtual World
Robert R. Archibald
carburetors and their replacement with fuel
injection systems eliminated a great source of
frustration for those who lived automobile-
dependent lives. But for Carter Carburetor and
thousands of employees, it was unemployment and
a severe disruption in life. There are thousands of
abandoned industrial buildings in my city where
beer was brewed, shoes manufactured, dresses made,
and cars built. The abandoned Carter Carburetor
factory, the vacant lots, and the abandoned
houses are proof that the nineteenth-century vision
of the city ran out of steam and suffocated on
obsolescence just like a Carter carburetor.
The nineteenth-century dream of the city is
over. Despite the demise of the old vision, it is still
incontrovertibly true that the future happens in
cities. Cities are where we work out the terms of
our engagement with each other and with the
places we inhabit. Cities are where, in the best of
circumstances, we honour and sometimes
overcome the past while we create our very own
menu of burdens, legacies, and ambiguities that
will be left for others.
Of all places on the planet, I care most
about St Louis. I care about the people, the culture,
the history, the future and the children. I listen to
Miles Davis, a neglected native son of my place. I
enjoy a St Louis style barbecue, and I walk in my
neighbourhood park every day. Last week, just at
dawn, a fox ran out in front of me, right here in the
middle of the city. When the hot humidity comes
in June, I just tell myself that it is ‘a big warm hug’.
I have lived here for seventeen years, and I am at
home. Although I work in a museum, my very first
loyalty is to the welfare of my place. But I think
that is what museums are for too.
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 13
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY

I visit a second-floor classroom at the
Missouri Historical Society. Leaders of the St Louis
Jewish community sit around the table. They began
meeting more than a year ago to discuss placing
historical markers on Jewish sites around the city.
They meet every few weeks, and the conversations
are rich. While they still plan to erect markers on
important sites, the scope of their work has
broadened. Now they are constructing a website
with more pages and more information than could
ever be included in a marker programme. They are
planning for narrated tours with maps that can be
downloaded to MP3 players and iPods. But the
discussions are what are most important.
Conversations about what to mark and what to
include on the website have really been about
memory, about what matters, about how a Jewish
identity in St Louis was created and sustained.
Even more importantly, the discussions have really
been about how to sustain a Jewish identity in
the future, in the face of the onslaught of
homogenizing forces. And how to pass on a sense
of identity to the next generation. Their work is
not about history or markers. It is about sustaining
community. It is about sharing the story, not just
among Jews but with the whole community.
‘Several historians and secular activists took the
matter to the Supreme Court and asked for a stay
on the exercise, but the court ruled recently against
them and upheld the new school syllabus,’ she
reported. ‘Overnight the new history textbooks
started arriving at the bookshops… . On a recent
morning, the children in a government-run school
in New Delhi sat hunched over their old history
books. ‘‘We are confused,’’ said Sakshi Walecha,
11, looking up from her book. ‘‘Now my teacher
tells us we have to buy new books because history
has changed.’’ ’ Rama Lakshmi wants to establish a
museum on caste in India because she knows that
the future of India hangs in the balance.
The future hangs in the balance for all of us
and for our descendants. For me, museums are
means, not ends. And urban museums are special
because they are precisely positioned in those
places where we make the future.

Our stories about ourselves are not fixed,

and there is no single true story. Every generation
rewrites them to explain themselves and their
places. How we write the stories determines what
we will do next. Rama Lakshmi tells me of the
current struggles in India over the content of
history books. Hindu people who are the majority
are attempting to write the story to elevate their
own significance and to minimize discussion of
divisive topics like caste. In 2002, Rama wrote an
article on the conflict for the Washington Post

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City Museums: do we have a role
in shaping the global community?
by Jack Lohman

Jack Lohman was educated at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom where he
studied The History of Art and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Westminster.
He is director of the Museum of London and professor in Museum Design at the Bergen
National Academy of the Arts in Norway. He is also a member of the United Kingdom National
Commission of UNESCO and a board member of the City of Warsaw Museum, Poland.

We live in an age of profound cultural transition, a

time in which the complexity of our multicultural
world confronts us with challenges, which have
taken on an urgency and intensity quite unlike
anything we have experienced in recent history. It
is a time when hardly any of our city museums are
free from having to undergo deep soul-searching
as to their meaning and role.

The past decade or so, in particular, has

been a period of deep crisis marked by tension and
clashes between and within nations. Such conflict
has variously been described as a clash of
‘civilizations’, of ‘cultures’, of ‘world-views’ or
‘values’. It is a tension which is ongoing and which
deepens in intensity daily. The role of culture in
the twenty-first century has become central to the
discourse on how an increasingly ‘global’ world
can survive without the threat of some being
swamped by the overpowering cultural force of
others.

It is also a time in which the managing

of cultural diversity has become a skill and a
competence, which is sought after in just about
every sphere of human endeavour. Most sensible
and fair-minded people acknowledge that learning

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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
to live with diversity is essential to peace and
human development. Respect for and
understanding of difference, cultural sensitivity,
freedom of cultural expression, cultural identity
and cultural rights occupy a substantial space on
the global political agenda. This is the age of
identity politics in which the conflicting interests
of preserving cultural identity, and that of
absorbing and being absorbed by prevailing
dominant cultures, clash with bloody force.
These clashes are not new. It is not the first
time that people have been divided along the fault-
line of cultural difference. Human history is
littered with tales of cultural conflict resulting in
conquest and annihilation but also of cultural
encounters resulting in human development and
progress.
Globalization: not a new process
‘Globalization’, though a modern term used to
describe the consequences of extraordinary rapid
technology-driven, information-based advances
over the past two decades, is not a new
phenomenon. It is, in fact, one of the oldest
processes known to humankind. It began when our
forebears set out from Africa to populate the planet
half a million years ago. The story of globalization
is that of the development of humankind itself. It is
the story of the meanderings and coming together,
the exchanges, the giving, the taking and the
sharing in the long process of human encounters
and achievements.
Human memory is appallingly short and
the speed of change, which is the hallmark of the
current experience of globalization, gives us little
16 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
time for reflection and recollection. And so we fall
prey to the amnesia of our age, and ascribe
uniqueness and particularity where it is not
deserved. We point to the manifestations and
proofs of our new global era with a sense of
wonder and self-admiration – global trade, the
global economy, global investments and global
information systems and networks. Some of us
even describe ourselves as ‘global citizens’,
members of that unique band of wanderers who
consider themselves free of the shackles of
nationalism and who choose to believe that
national borders, passports and immigration
officers are minor irritations along the global
highway.
So when Richard Parker, Senior Fellow at
the Shorenstein Centre, John F. Kennedy School of
Government Faculty at Harvard, and an Oxford
economist, reminds us that, while there is much
that is undeniably new about the world in which
we live, there is little new about what he refers
to as the ‘long-established patterns and
achievements’1 upon which much of this ‘newness’
is built: ‘Even those larger features we think of as
most distinct about our own ‘global’ era today – the
immense trade flows, or the constant information
of the worldwide web, or the electronic financial
markets that send billions of dollars coursing
around the globe – all have a longer and deeper
heritage than most of us understand’.2
Parker cites as an example, current US
international trade which, though the total volume
has increased, when measured as a percentage
of gross national product, is virtually at the same
level it was under Theodore Roosevelt because
the US economy has grown proportionately.
 City Museums: do we have a role in shaping the global community?
Similarly, in the case of international finance
and global capital markets, we forget that the
‘golden age’ of trade and investment happened, not
in the last fifty years but in the latter half of the
nineteenth century.
The significance of Parker’s argument is
that, unlike those who would have us believe that
we live in a unique and unprecedented period of
human history, we can in fact look for what he
calls ‘patterns and connections… trends and
similarities’ and we are able to tap into the rich
traditions of the past, the experiences and values of
our mutual ancestors and our faith to ‘shape this
world as those before have tried to do’.3
But increasing diversity and consequent
conflict mark the spirit of the infant twenty-first
century, leaving hardly a corner of our world
untouched. There is a growing sense that ‘this is
not going to go away’. The times are indeed
‘a-changin’, and ‘a-changin’, in a way that seems
bent on destruction. What is equally disconcerting
is the confusion, which has been created,
particularly in the West, among institutions which
once thought they knew the way things worked
and were clear about their role in society. Religious
institutions are an interesting example of this. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, there was
little doubt in the minds of most mainline church
leaders in the West that Christianity was strong
and on the verge of spreading its message to every
corner of the earth. The spirit of optimism and
faith which spurred the Church on well into the
second half of the twentieth century has given way
(in the most part, if somewhat reluctantly) to
acceptance that the world is religiously pluralistic
and that the ‘Christian West’ no longer has
Jack Lohman
meaning other than as a historical definition of a
bygone age which will probably never be seen
again.
However, in spite of all this, religious
traditions still have the ambivalent power to be
agents of both healing and destruction.
Fundamentalism manifests itself in almost every
religious tradition, fuelling intolerance of that
which is different. In recent times, the expanding
plurality of cultures, values and norms has led
to conflict and exclusion. Forgotten is the
wisdom of theologians such as Max Müller who
taught that those who know only one religion,
one culture, one way of life, know none, not even
their own.
This thought is echoed in UNESCO’s
position on cultural diversity. In a recent statement
we read: ‘Among UNESCO’s chief missions is
ensuring space for and freedom of expression to all
the world’s cultures. It considers that, while each
culture draws from its own roots, it must fail
to blossom without contact with other cultures.
It is not therefore a matter of identifying and
safeguarding every culture in isolation, but rather
of revitalizing them in order to avoid segregation
and prevent conflict.’ The statement concludes:
‘This cultural dialogue has taken on a new meaning
in the context of globalization and of the current
international political climate. Thus it is becoming
a vital means of maintaining peace and world
unity’.4
Because we are all by both nature and
nurture cultural beings and our institutional life is
an expression of our corporate cultural identity,
none of us is free of cultural influence, nor should
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 17
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
we be. The events of 11 September 2001 have
reminded us that ignorance of our diversity and
differences, wilful or not, holds the seeds of mass
destruction as surely as any nuclear weapon. The
world is caught between opposing currents or
forces with regard to this issue. While opposing,
they are also interrelated.
On the one hand, there is what is called the
‘centripetal force’ of globalization which refers to
the phenomenon of the world’s cultures being
increasingly thrown together, leading to an
undermining of a sense of territorialism and an
increase in a sense of collectivism and a shared
reality. The world is thus woven together by the
global forces of media, communications,
information and technology. But the benefits for
some, more often than not, work to the detriment
of others. The divide is clearly defined between
the West and the Rest. The power of global
integration is felt by the Rest as threatening, as
overpowering, a threat to the uniqueness of the
already marginalized masses. On the other hand,
we are witnessing the ever-increasing struggle for
particular cultural, ethnic, religious and other
identities. The centrifugal forces of narrow group
identities, of blood and belonging, the deep ties of
language, religion and race all conspire to mitigate
against the forces of ‘centripetalism’.
Museums and diversity
Museums exist within this complex global
environment, and are not spared the pressures and
challenges to transform and find a role and
meaning. We are not able to stand apart from the
societies in which we exist, to interpret and reflect
diverse society to itself.
18 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
In another statement on culture, UNESCO
has this to say: ‘A museum works for the
endogenous development of social communities
whose testimonies it conserves while lending a
voice to their cultural aspirations. Resolutely
turned towards its public, community museums
are attentive to social and cultural change and help
us to present our identity and diversity in an ever-
changing world’.5 This role and definition of
museums has come a long way since their formal
establishment 200 years ago as places for the
display of artefacts and for study. Today, museums
are defined as ‘non-profit-making, permanent
institutions in the service of society and its
development, and open to the public, which
acquire, conserve, communicate and exhibit, for
purposes of study, education and enjoyment,
material evidence of people and their
environment’. This broadening of definition has
shifted our role from being merely a ‘stage’ to
being ‘actors’ on the broader stage of life itself
where we are part of the larger cast made up of
societies and nations and where together we
develop the plot for our future. In this sense we are
more than ‘actors’. We are ‘interactors’ who present
the multiple, diverse interactions between nature,
culture, history, art, craft and indeed everything
that makes us who we are.
The world in which we play this role is
characterized by an extraordinary juxtaposition
and diversity of peoples, cultures, traditions,
ethnic, political and religious differences thrown
together as never before. The historian, Arnold
Toynbee, identified this phenomenon as
Volkwanderung, the swirling movement of
individuals, peoples and cultures in pursuit of a
different and better life. Within given national
 City Museums: do we have a role in shaping the global community?
societies, both new arrivals and older ethnic or
cultural groups struggle to express their
differences, their uniqueness, while being brought
face to face with others doing the same. The old
hegemony of dominant cultures is breaking down,
bringing with it a sense of dismay and threat. Even
the United States, the only superpower left, despite
its own multicultural nature and the inordinate
influence of its culture on the rest of the world, is
finding it difficult to live in this new order. What
we are witnessing today, in the face of this
perceived threat, is a growing intolerance for
difference and conflict.
When faced by a threat of this nature, we
have, as a society, three responses to choose from.
One is to assimilate. Assimilation is, at heart, the
defeat of one by the other, a capitulation to the
dominant culture. It is how many minorities
perceive the dilution and co-option of their
cultures while the majority prides itself on being
‘tolerant’. In this way, much, if not all of the
richness of diversity is lost or driven underground,
there to be perceived as undermining and
subversive by the majority.
The other response is that of exclusion. We
build borders around ourselves and our cultures
and require that others stay outside them.
The third way is to acknowledge difference
as equal and as having the right to co-exist within a
neutral public space, while pursuing difference and
expressing it within private spheres of individual
social reality. This is what is known as liberal
coexistence. Despite its best intentions, the
avoidance of open conflict and the balance of
mutual self-interest in public programmes, liberal
Jack Lohman
coexistence can lead to isolation and
fragmentation. It is entirely dependent upon
mutual tolerance, an agreement to live beside each
other, not to threaten each other.
In all these responses, diversity, rather
than being protected, is sacrificed for the sake of a
perceived unity and an avoidance of conflict. The
commitment to promote ‘the fruitful diversity of
cultures’ for a more open and creative world in the
new twenty-first century context, expressed in
the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural
Diversity (2 November 2002), is based upon its
conviction that ‘respect for cultural diversity and
intercultural dialogue is one of the surest
guarantees of development and peace’.
The recognition of the centrality of culture
in peace-making, the pursuit of full liberty,
individual and societal meaning and expression,
provides cultural institutions such as city museums
a rare opportunity. This is ‘foreign territory’ to
many of us working in museums. The challenge to
museums to engage in issues such as the building
of national identity out of the fragments of diverse
groups, to be agents for change and peace-
building, and help to address the challenge of
poverty reduction are all part of a brief which some
would consider beyond our ambit and capability.
There is therefore a need to engage the
discourse within the museum community itself,
lest there be a feeling that we are being asked to
step in where others have failed. We need to
grapple with these questions honestly, allowing
our own fears and concerns to be expressed. We
need to be assisted in confronting our own cultural
agendas, in facing our own limitations.
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY

How are we coping with diversity within
our own environments? How open are we to the
‘other’ point of view on issues which are precious
to us? How will we conduct these debates and with
whom? How will we be assisted in dealing with the
potential conflict which will inevitably arise from
the discussion? What is the extent of our
accountability and to what and to whom are we
primarily responsible?
There will be those who will have no doubt
and will need no convincing of the rightness of
this role and there will be those who will be
anxious as to what the implications for themselves
and their institutions might be. There will also
be those who will have very real difficulties and
even be resistant to engaging in the discussion.
This is the nature of our own diversity as a
community of museums – a diverse community
within diverse communities.
diversity, we will do no better than others who
have tried before us.
The challenge for us as a community
within a community is to be honest and
courageous in the acknowledgement that if we are
to play a role in which all the richness of city
culture can contribute to the development of
people in their totality, then we must be true to the
challenge of being more open to diversity
ourselves: the people who direct museums, who
work within their walls, who conserve, curate and
exhibit.
We must be what we wish to become and
what this world in all its global richness can and
must be.
NOTES

I am personally of the view that cultural 1. Parker, R. (2002) ‘Wanna do something about globalization? You might
institutions and museums, and city museums in start learning a little history’, In From Conquistadors to Corporations,
Sojourners Magazine, May/June.
particular, do indeed have a critical role in all of
this. I have been fortunate to be part of such an 2. Ibid.
endeavour in South Africa in the restructuring of
museums in that once fraught country where 3. Ibid.

diversity was the cause of deep divisions. I am very

4. Intercultural Dialogue: UNESCO Culture Sector website:
aware that nation-building out of the material of http://portal.unesco.org/culture/.
the past is not possible without a willingness to
face that past squarely, while at the same time 5. Ibid.

acknowledging the power of its legacy to survive in

the present and into the future. It is this legacy, the
baggage of the past, the unresolved issues, the
unexpressed fears and the uncritical assumptions,
the imposition of what others think to be best, that
undermine our highest hopes and best intentions.
Without dealing with our own issues regarding

20 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
History, Ethnicity and Citizenship:
the role of the history museum
in a multi-ethnic country1
by Victoria Dickenson

Victoria Dickenson is executive director of the McCord Museum in Montreal, Canada. She is a
graduate of the museum studies programme at the University of Toronto and obtained her
Ph.D. in Canadian history from Carleton University (1995). She has many years’ experience
working in the Canadian and international museum community, as a curator, public
programmes director, exhibition planner, information technology adviser and interpretive
consultant.

In 2005, the McCord Museum was asked to

undertake a study for the Quebec Government’s
Ministry of Culture and Communications on
the relationship between museums, ethnic
communities and cultural heritage in Montreal. This
study proved to be surprisingly difficult to complete,
and forced us to reflect more deeply than we had
anticipated on the complex relationships between
ethnicity, material history and the work
of the public museum. The McCord is a public
museum located in Quebec, a province
characterized by a strong consciousness of a distinct
francophone (or French-speaking) ‘national’
identity, often politically and culturally at odds with
the rest of the country. In 1971, Canada declared an
official policy of ‘multiculturalism’, and in 1988,
Parliament adopted the Canadian Multicultural Act,
which ‘recognizes the diversity of Canadians as
regards race, national or ethnic origin, colour and
religion as a fundamental characteristic of Canadian
society’, and encourages the preservation of
multicultural heritage. Quebec, which has a special
status within the Canadian confederation, also
promotes a policy of interculturalisme that seeks the

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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
integration of newcomers into the broader
French-speaking society.
This article will explore the ways in
which ethnicity is defined and expressed in both
Canada and Quebec. It will also examine the
challenges faced by the public museum in the
collection and preservation of the material heritage
of Canadians in light of the country’s ethnic
diversity and political directions. The paper will
conclude with an attempt to understand more
specifically the role of the public history museum
in engaging the community with the history of this
place, and the relationship between this
engagement and the development of both a
sentiment d’appartenance (sense of belonging) and
a shared citizenship.
The ethnocultural landscape of Canada
Canada is one of the most ethnically diverse
countries in the world, and that diversity is the
result of large-scale immigration, particularly in
the twentieth century. Canada welcomed
13.4 million immigrants over the last hundred
years, and in 2002, almost a quarter of its
population was born outside the country. In the
Canadian context, diversity is defined in the Ethnic
Diversity Survey (a follow-up to the 2001 Census)
as the varied and complex ethnodemographic
make-up of Canada, with reference to several key
identity ‘markers’ like ethnicity, race and religion.
In 1931, those markers were applied to people
coming primarily from Europe; today the markers
refer to a much larger spectrum of peoples,
arriving from all parts of the world, and who are
distinguished often visibly, as well as by language
or religion, from the older Canadian population.
22 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
This new ethnic diversity is particularly
characteristic of urban centres. For example, over
50 per cent of the population of Toronto was born
outside Canada, and about 45 per cent of
Torontonians report themselves as being part of a
‘visible minority’.2 In the 2001 census, over 30 per
cent of Vancouver-area residents reported being of
Asian ethnicity, with Chinese Canadians
accounting for 17.7 per cent of the city’s total
population.3 In Montreal, the world’s second
largest French-speaking city, ethnicity is tempered
by the complexity of linguistic affiliation, with 29
per cent of the city’s population classifying
themselves as ‘allophones’, Canadians whose
mother tongue is neither English nor French.4 And
while Montreal remains a predominantly Roman
Catholic city, Islam is the fastest-growing and third
largest faith in Quebec, with Muslims accounting
for 3 per cent of the Montreal urban population.5
Policies of Integration
How does Canada accommodate this startling
diversity of race, religion, ethnicity and language?
According to the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism
Act:
The Government of Canada recognizes the diversity
of Canadians as regards race, national or ethnic
origin, colour and religion as a fundamental
characteristic of Canadian society and is committed
to a policy of multiculturalism designed to preserve
and enhance the multicultural heritage of Canadians
while working to achieve the equality of all
Canadians in the economic, social, cultural and
political life of Canada.6
For Will Kymlicka of Queen’s University,
the principle of multiculturalism is the quest for
 History, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Victoria Dickenson

‘fair terms of integration’. While some internal

critics of Canada’s policy contend that the Act
encourages a divisive society of isolated
ethnicities,7 Kymlica avers that within this idea of
fair terms of integration are clear limits regarding
common institutions and values.8 He sees this most
clearly expressed in Quebec, that distinct society
housed within the Canadian confederation. In
ª Statistics Canada publication Quebec, the policy of interculturalisme demands
that new immigrants and members of what are
called ‘cultural communities (communautées
culturelles)’ subscribe to the three principles that
form the basis of the ‘moral contract’ between
Quebec and its new citizens: (a) recognition of
French as the language of public life; (b) respect
2
for liberal democratic values, including civil and
2. Graph 1: ‘‘Ethnic ancestry of the population, by generation in Canada, political rights and equality of opportunity; and (c)
2002‘‘, Statistics Canada publication ‘‘Ethnic Diversity Survey: portrait of respect for pluralism, including openness to and
a multicultural society’’, 2002, Catalogue 89-593, 29 September, 2003.
tolerance of others’ differences.9

Interculturalisme may be seen as a reaction

to the lack of what might be termed a ‘national
culture’, which in Canada has always floundered
on the rocks of geography, regional culture and
linguistic identity.10 The very existence of two
founding nations, differing in language, culture
and religion, as well as the more recent recognition
of a third charter group within Canada, the
ª Statistics Canada publication

Aboriginal peoples, make the idea of ethnic

nationalism untenable both within Quebec and in
Canada.

Understanding ethnicity
3
How then is ethnicity interpreted within the
3. Graph 2: ’’Reporting of Canadian, provincial or regional ethnic Canadian context of diversity and citizenship?
identities, by generation in Canada, 2002‘‘, from the Statistics Canada
publication ‘‘Ethnic Diversity Survey: portrait of a multicultural society’’, Ethnicity can be examined in a social sense, where
2002, Catalogue 89-593, 29 September, 2003. it can be equated with a sentiment d’appartenance, a

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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
feeling of belonging. An individual may feel as if he
or she belongs within a certain group, and this
sense of belonging may last for many generations.
For example, in the case of the Scots, a group that
has been part of the mainstream Canadian
population for many generations, the feeling of
‘being Scottish’ remains strong in certain
individuals, as is evidenced by their membership in
a cultural society, such as the St Andrew’s Society,
or by their adherence to certain customs associated
with a Scots allegiance – country dancing, kilt-
wearing, haggis-eating. At the same time, when
the membership of certain overtly ‘Scottish’
organizations is examined, the ethnic link is more
difficult to define. The Black Watch, for example,
is the oldest Highland regiment in Canada, and its
current membership is both ethnically and racially
diverse as can be seen in the photographs on its
website.11
Ethnicity might also be understood in an
anthropological sense, in that it is determined by
specific descent from a particular genetically
linked population. One belongs to an ethnic group
if one has descended from parents or perhaps
grandparents who are part of that group. This
ethnicity is often preserved through in-marriage
(marriage within the ethnic group). Out-marriage
is often perceived by group members as a rejection
of ethnicity, albeit in Canada, there is increasing
evidence of people reporting more than one ethnic
ancestry, the likely result of intermarriage. In
2001, 11.3 million people, or 38 per cent of the
population, reported multiple ethnic origins, an
increase from previous censuses. The Ethnic
Diversity Survey also noted that a person’s ethnic
identity (self-characterization) may be the same as,
or different from, the ancestry of parents and
24 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
grandparents. By the second or third generation,
members with common ethnic ancestry may
identify most strongly as Canadian, or even as a
member of a regional identity, such as Westerner
or Newfoundlander.12
Ethnicity can also be equated with
religious or racial grouping. The Jewish
community, despite being composed of members
from differing national, ethnic and even racial
origins, often has strong inter-group links, based
on shared religion and shared religious practice
(and a strong sense of shared history). The Black
community, often seen by outsiders as monolithic,
due to skin colour, is composed of members with
widely varying national, cultural and linguistic
origins. The notion of ascribing a shared ‘ethnicity’
to these groups is extremely problematic, though
all members do share one characteristic affiliation
which runs along a spectrum from strong to
weak, and is often used by the group to define itself
at least in part in relation to the external
non-affiliated community.
Material culture, ethnicity and museums
What is the role, then, of the public museum, and
most specifically the history museum, in a country
as ethnically and culturally diverse as Canada and
especially in a bilingual and pluricultural city like
Montreal? How do ethnic communities regard the
institution of the museum, when they regard it at
all, and what place does an established museum
have in these communities? As part of the study
undertaken by the McCord, we undertook a
literature review of articles in English and French
on museums, ethnicity and diversity; we brought
together findings from earlier studies; and we held

focus groups and structured interviews with
members of Montreal’s cultural communities.
What emerged from these efforts was an
understanding that the relationship between the
public museum and cultural communities, at least
in Montreal and by extension in much of Canada,
was more potential than realized, was often
fractious and fragmented, and deserved both
analysis and action.
Public museums in Western society are
usually assigned two chief mandates: preservation
and access. Preservation involves both the
conservation of the material object in safe storage,
and the intellectual conservation of information
about the object through documentation and
cataloguing. Access may include quasi-public as
well as public access. Much of the recent criticism
directed at the public museum revolves around
questions of trust and social responsibility. The
museum is seen by some scholars and members of
the public as exclusionary, actively excluding or
passively neglecting a portion of history or artistic
creation, and abrogating its responsibility to its
publics.
The mandate of the museum is, however,
not to collect ‘the past’ or even to tell its story in
public displays, but to collect and preserve objects,
based on certain criteria of selection, and to give
access to them. This is admittedly a narrow
definition of the museum’s mandate, and I will
return to its larger social purpose, but it is
important to explore the ways in which collections,
which form the bedrock of the institution, are
defined and developed. The criteria for acquisition
selection used by museums reflect for the most part
the current interests of the society in which the
History, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Victoria Dickenson
institution is embedded. Societal interests
translated into categories of museum classification
may in fact exclude certain classes of objects,
making these objects less likely to become part of
the public material record of the past, and less
available to historians as ‘documents’ on which to
base historical analysis or public exhibition. These
collection gaps, once identified, may take
generations to fill, as witness collections reflecting
women’s experiences. How is ethnicity, then,
translated into material culture, the artefacts of
museum collections?
For objects, ethnicity can be a difficult
category of description. In its simplest form, an
‘ethnic’ object is associated with the folk or
traditional culture of a particular ethnic and often
national group, and has intrinsic ethnic markers
(Ukrainian dance costume, Portuguese tiles,
Chinese tea bowls or chopsticks, ceinture fléchée).
These objects are used by both the group and by
the external community to exemplify and identify
ethnicity, and are often either brought by
immigrants from the country of origin or made in
the country of immigration according to traditional
instructions (though occasionally the immigrant
community preserves antiquated or obsolete
traditions no longer current in the country of
origin.) More complicated is the object
appropriated from the mainstream culture and
modified for use within the ethnic community,
such as the buttons or T-shirts which proclaim
‘Kiss me, I’m Ukrainian’. Most complex of all, at
least in terms of identifying objects as bearers of
ethnicity, is the mainstream object used by the
cultural community and thus figuring in the
community or group history (a set of keys to a first
Montreal apartment valued by a Portuguese
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY

museums categorize objects in their collections’

databases. For example, our museum database
does not include an ‘ethnicity’ category attached
to the donor. Unless a donor’s name bears
itself an ethnic marker, mainstream culture
objects such as Barbie dolls, donated by a member
of an ethnic community, would be unlikely to
be understood as evidence of ethnic group
preference.

Community expectations

What became clear through the small sample in the

focus group for the Quebec study, and through
subsequent conversations, is the limited view the
external community – ‘the public’ – has of
museums. The museum is usually seen only
through the lens of exhibition, as a place for
display, and perhaps family or school visits.
Discussions with members of cultural communities
ª McCord Museum

reveal that they often fail to perceive the

fundamental importance to museums of the
collecting, preservation and research functions,
though many groups do themselves appreciate the
4
value of archives, particularly letters, diaries and
4. Ceinture flechée (Belt with arrows), 19th century, M5437. photographs, as historical sources important to
community identity. The museum’s role as a
immigrant, a fashionable Paris-made wedding collecting institution, as a place for preserving
dress worn in Montreal for a traditional Jewish objects for future generations, is frequently
wedding). Without knowledge of provenance and misunderstood and even regarded with suspicion.
history, these objects bear no intrinsic ethnic For example, during our focus group, a member of
markers. Finally, the question of objects once the Montreal Black community contended that
identified strongly with an ethnic community people in the McCord Museum were probably
but transferred within the mainstream also bears unaware that there had been slaves in Quebec in
some examination (in Canada, the Asian wok, the eighteenth century, and he assumed that the
Italian pasta bowls, Chinese embroidered jackets, collections would certainly not contain objects
Celtic heart rings). This problem of ethnic related to that disquieting history. Like most
identification is reflected in the way in which history museums, however, the McCord actively

26 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

seeks to collect objects related to the history of the
working class and ‘outcast’ groups, and not only
were museum staff aware of this part of our
collective history, but had made efforts to acquire a
number of early watercolours showing Black
people in the role of servants or perhaps slaves
(though status is difficult to determine from the
images alone).
As the museum begins to attempt to
remedy neglect and to collect actively in a cultural
community, it also faces misunderstandings of its
intention, and of the nature of contemporary
museum collecting. In some cases, members of a
cultural community express concern that the
‘other’ is appropriating their heritage, to hide it
away. In many respects, given the small number of
objects on display at any one time in a large
museum, this is true. Many members of these
ethnic and cultural communities feel it is more
appropriate that the objects remain within the
community itself, where, if they are in more danger
of being lost or damaged, at least they are seen and
appreciated and enter in to the daily understanding
of the group and its ongoing history. More difficult
than the worry of appropriation and loss is the
dissonance over what is valued or represented.
What an academically trained curator values may
not be what the member of the cultural group or
even of the larger society might value. For
example, the Italo-Canadian curator of a recent
exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization
on Italian Canadians chose to feature in the
exhibition the hockey stick of Phil Esposito, a
famous Canadian hockey player of Italian origin.
The hockey stick is not intrinsically Italian. It
represents rather the integration and success of a
member of that cultural community in what is
History, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Victoria Dickenson
called ‘Canada’s game’. Critics asked where the
evidence was of the ‘high culture’ commonly
associated with Italy, the roster of famous Italians
like Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo have also shaped
Italian-Canadian society. Did not every Italian
bring to Canada something of that culture? (The
Italian cultural centre in Montreal is named after
Leonardo da Vinci.) On the other hand, women
in the Italian community demanded that the
exhibition also feature information on violence
against women, which they saw as an important
part of their community history, a subject,
however, that leaves few traces in the material
record.
Values and missions
This dissonance concerning the nature of the
‘museum piece’, the object worthy enough to be in
a museum collection, revealed in the example
above, results, I think, from ideas about the place
of the museum in society. Museums in the Western
world have a reputation and a history as
hegemonic institutions, collecting what we
acknowledge as treasures, and displaying them in
normative cultural and historical exhibitions.
Thus, museums have an equivocal role in modern
society: they are deemed irrelevant to the interests
of particular communities who are outside the
‘norm’, and as such should be avoided, but at the
same time they can be used to establish the value
of a community’s heritage, its own treasures.
Members of ethnic groups may see a museum as a
place to preserve and present their own material
culture as defined by the community itself, a space
in which to tell the story that the community
sanctions. The staff of the public museum, on the
other hand, who are more likely to share notions
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 27
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
about value related to their specialist academic and
museological training, collect objects relevant to an
historical inquiry, ranging from the mundane
(laundry lists) to the rare, which in contemporary
context is as likely to be an example of working-
class underwear as a treasured wedding dress. The
museum then presents these objects in exhibitions
in which ‘voice’ is overt and discussion
encouraged, presenting a view of a group’s history
or identity that may well be at odds with that held
by the group itself.
This is part of the distinction between
heritage and history that the historian David
Lowenthal makes in his book, The Heritage
Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998). According
to Lowenthal, while heritage can affirm and shape
identity, it is in essence exclusionary. One’s
heritage is particular and cannot readily be shared
with someone outside one’s particular group.
Heritage lends itself to celebration, rather than
examination, and it is in this respect that conflict
may arise between the goals of the public museum
and those of a group wishing to affirm and
celebrate its heritage. Fundamental to the work of
most museums is the notion of access, access to the
objects and the information that shapes our
historical understanding, the essence of public
history. The history the public museum tells may
not, however, be the story a cultural community or
a heritage group itself wants to hear. Americans
may remember the controversy over the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s exhibition
on the Enola Gay. While not itself about ethnicity,
the restoration of the Enola Gay and subsequent
exhibition project provoked a destructive conflict
between a community dedicated to celebrating
the heritage of military service, as represented by
28 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
the bomber and its mission, and the historians
of the museum, who sought to explore and
question the accepted canon about American
atomic intervention in the final days of the Second
World War. After protests by veterans’ groups
and their supporters, the exhibition was cancelled
and the museum director resigned. As a member
of the US House of Representatives and a
Smithsonian regent declared, Americans ‘want the
Smithsonian to reflect real America and not
something that a historian dreamed up’.13 The
tension between heritage and history has rarely
been more succinctly stated.
The role of the public museum
I think that Lowenthal’s distinction is very
important in a multi-ethnic country like Canada. It
goes to the heart of the role of the public museum
and to its function as a social institution. The late
Stephen Weil was a proponent of ‘outcome-based
evaluation’ for museums. In a speech to the British
Museum Annual Meeting in 1999 he said that, ‘If
our museums are not being operated with the
ultimate goal of improving the quality of people’s
lives, on what [other] basis might we possibly ask
for public support?’ He ended his speech with the
assertion that the pride that museum workers take
in their calling was the pride of being ‘associated
with an enterprise that has so profound a capacity
to make a positive difference in the quality of
individual lives, an enterprise that can – in so
many significant ways and in so many remarkably
different ways – enrich the common well-being of
our communities’.14
Weil’s notion that museums were
deserving of the support of their public only when

they worked for ‘the common well-being’ of people
is an important one. Weil does not define common
well-being, but I would like to link his idea with
the ideas expressed by Canadian economist John
Helliwell on the impact of social capital on well-
being. Helliwell noted in a recent paper, that
‘people apparently care a lot about the social
context within which they work and play.
Whatever their personality type, they value trust in
their neighbourhoods, their workplaces, their
public services and their public servants’.15
Quebec’s Immigration and Integration
Policy (1991) stipulates that both private and
public institutions must adjust to the pluralist
reality in order to aid immigrants and their
descendants to become integrated into Quebec
society.16 I would like to suggest that the museum
is as much part of people’s social context as the
workplace or government office, and that its
trustworthiness and its effectiveness in serving
the public can contribute to people’s sense of
well-being and ultimately their sense of
belonging, the ground on which citizenship is
constructed.17
This issue is particularly important to a
museum like the McCord, specialized in the
collection of the material culture of Canada, and
presenting its exhibitions in the museum and on
the web in both French and English. I would like
to suggest that we can contribute to the
construction of a sense of belonging through the
collection and presentation of the material history
of our country. I use the term ‘history’ consciously,
adopting Lowenthal’s distinction between heritage,
with its exclusionary undertones, and the historical
canon, with its open, participatory nature. The
History, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Victoria Dickenson
museum, our museum, needs to ensure that our
collections reflect the history of this place, our
place. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
the founder of the McCord Museum, David Ross
McCord, believed that Canada’s history, though
brief, could offer to its citizens a vision of national
identity based on the best of the French and British
civilizations, with a romantic dollop of Indian-ness
added from the ‘original owners of the land’.
Canadians would boast blended identities, much
perhaps like McCord’s own – British, bilingual,
with a trace of Jewish, and with special
appreciation of Aboriginal heritage. Up until the
1990s our collections continued to be built by and
large on McCord’s base, documenting the history
of Aboriginal communities, French explorers and
settlers, and British, especially Scottish,
immigrants. But our collections no longer
represent the history of our place; this is our first
challenge. Until we can incorporate the objects,
images and documents that reflect our more recent
history, we cannot claim to serve our public
adequately; to contribute to the common well-
being we must find the means to ensure ‘fair terms
of integration’ for the material culture of Canadian
citizens.
While the collections are fundamental to
our work, we must also acknowledge the
significant social role of the museum as a
hegemonic institution. One can only feel at home,
can only develop a sense of belonging when the
institutions of the social context are accessible and
responsive. Our review of the literature of ethnicity
and museums revealed a willingness on the part of
many institutions to expose the heritage of the
cultural communities to the mainstream
communities through special ‘ethnic’ exhibitions,
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 29
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
or commemorative programmes and community
festivals. I think that this willingness must now be
translated, at least in Montreal, to an exploration of
the new identity that we are developing as a
people. This braided identity is grounded in our
history, and by collecting, researching and
presenting that history, I think we can begin to
serve all members of our community.
Is this approach just wishful thinking?
How can understanding the history of early French
exploration, the founding of Montreal by
Champlain, the role of the Scots in the fur trade
contribute to the sense of belonging of people
whose families moved here in the 1960s or 1990s?
H.E. Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s former
Governor General, arrived in the country from
Hong Kong as a child. She said in a speech in 2003
that she realized at some point that the whole
history of her new land was her history, that if she
were going to live here, she had to understand
what had made the place the way it was. Only
through reading the history, and knowing the
geography, was she able to develop her sense of
belonging and an affinity for the country of which
she had become a citizen.
I believe strongly that the museum is more
than just a collection of objects. It is an instrument
that helps us to use history to reflect on the way
we live now. Through history we seek to create
order in our own lives and to explain our world.
Understanding our history, then, is important not
only for us as individuals but also as citizens of the
global community. Canadians live in a fortunate
space that we have made for ourselves over time.
How do we preserve it, and how do we continue to
strengthen it? How do we play our part in the
30 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
world? We feel strongly that our museum can be
not only a reflection of our past as a nation but a
proving ground for the new braided identity that
we are evolving together.
NOTES
1. Another version of this article appeared in the March/April 2006 issue of
MUSE, the journal of the Canadian Museums Association.
2. ‘Visible minority’ is defined by Statistics Canada as ‘persons, other than
Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in
colour’. Website: http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_facts/diversity.htm
(consulted 12 November 2005).
3. Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Proportion of Total Population
website: http://www.asiapacific.ca/data/people/demographics_data-
set2_bycity.cfm (consulted 12 November 2005).
4. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census, Profile of Languages in Canada website:
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/
lang/provs.cfm (consulted 12 November 2005).
5. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census, Religions of Canada, ‘Quebec: largest
proportion of Roman Catholics’ Website: http://www12.statcan.ca/english/
census01/Products/Analytic/companion/rel/qc.cfm (consulted 12
November 2005).
6. Canadian Multiculturalism Act, R.S., 1985, c. 24 (4th Supp.); [C-18.7]: An
Act for the Preservation and Enhancement of Multiculturalism in Canada
(1988, c. 31, assented to 21 July, 1988), Preamble; http://www.pch.gc.ca/
progs/multi/policy/act_e.cfm/.
7. See, for example, Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions. The Cult of
Multiculturalism in Canada, Toronto, Penguin, 1994.
8. Will Kymlicka, ‘The theory and practice of Canadian multiculturalism’,
Canadian Federation of the Humanities, 23 November 1998. Website:
http://www.fedcan.ca/english/fromold/breakfast-kymlicka1198.cfm
(consulted 12 November 2005).
9. See the site for the Ministère de l’Immigration et Communautés
Culturelle du Québec, Valeurs et Fondements de la Société Québecoise.
Website: http://www.mrci.gouv.qc.ca/quebecinterculturel/fr/201_2.asp/.
 History, Ethnicity and Citizenship
Victoria Dickenson

10. Pierre Anctil, ‘Défi et gestion de l’immigration internationale au

Québec’, Website: http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/cdn/documents/
defi.et.gestionde.limmigration.internationale.au.quebec.pdf (consulted
12 November 2005).

11. http://www.blackwatchcanada.com/en/index.htm/.

12. Statistics Canada, The Daily, 29 September 2003. Website:

http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/030929/d030929a.htm (consulted
15 November 2005).

13. Representative Sam Johnson, cited in David Lowenthal, The Heritage

Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), p.161.

14. Stephen E. Weil, ‘Transformed from a cemetery of bric-à-brac’, in

Institute of Museum and Library Services, Smithsonian Institution,
Perspectives on Outcome Based Evaluation for Libraries and Museums.
Website: http://www.imls.gov/pubs/pdf/pubobe.pdf (consulted
15 November 2005).

15. John Helliwell, ‘Well-being, social capital and public policy: what’s
new?’ Preliminary paper delivered on 21 March 2005 at the Royal
Economic Society Annual Meeting. Electronic document provided by the
author.

16. http://www.mrci.gouv.qc.ca/52_2.asp?pid¼quebecinterculturel/fr/101/.

17. There is some evidence to suggest that the presence of a cultural

centre in an Aboriginal community can contribute to reduced suicide
rates: John Helliwell, personal communication. See also M.J. Chandler
and C. Lalonde ‘Cultural continuity as a hedge against suicide in Canada’s
First Nations’, Transcultural Psychiatry (1998), 35, pp. 191–219.

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 31

 Museums of Cities and Urban
Futures: new approaches to urban
planning and the opportunities
for museums of cities
by Duncan Grewcock

Duncan Grewcock is a Ph.D. research student at the UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage,
University College London, where he is researching urban museums and human
geographies. Prior to his doctoral research he was a museum and heritage consultant with
LORD Cultural Resources.

‘Past. Present. Future. The rational divisions of the rational

life. And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the
moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is
not rational, not divided. That the mirrored compartments
could break’.
(Winterson 1997, p. 20)

Uncertainty and complexity

Museums of cities face a greater set of challenges

than any other kind of museum in the world
today. Given the concentration of energy and
activity within cities and the extent of their impact
and influence, museums are affected by cities
to some degree or another. The future of
museums is inextricably linked to the future of
cities.

To a significant extent, change defines the

city, whether it be social, physical, technological,
economic, cultural, environmental or political. If
cities are the ‘defining artefact of civilization’1 as is
often claimed, then museums of cities have an

32 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) ª UNESCO 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

opportunity, and, I believe, a responsibility, to
actively engage with, and help communities to
understand and to actively shape change in their
urban environments. This is an inherently
uncertain and complex undertaking. But, living
and planning with uncertainty and complexity,
balancing risk with creativity, are required skills in
the cities of today and tomorrow.
This article argues that museums of cities
should develop a more visible and creative role in
urban planning and place-making. New directions
in urban planning and museum policy and practice
effectively show two worlds in convergence but
unaware of the true relevance of each other.
Through a more effective, formal dialogue,
museums of cities could make a telling
contribution to sustainable, inclusive and
imaginative urban planning and place-making.
This kind of active participation in the planning
process may also provide museums with new levels
of engagement with communities on the issues that
matter to them, and in the process open up
museums to new audiences.
In this article I would like to communicate
three key messages: firstly, that promoting a role
for museums of cities in urban planning is more
one of revival than invention; secondly, that the
culture and practice of urban planning is changing
in interesting and relevant ways to museums of
cities; thirdly, that in many ways, museums and
urban planning are fields in convergence. This is a
period where boundaries between disciplines are
being challenged and transgressed.
It is important to differentiate what I am
discussing here from what has almost become an
Museums of Cities and Urban Futures
Duncan Grewcock
orthodoxy in recent discussions on the future of
cities, and that is culture-led economic
regeneration and cultural planning. The economic
importance of cities as centres of creativity and
culture has perhaps never been more obviously
appreciated – or promoted – by governments and
city authorities, and cultural planning has now
emerged as a distinct form of urban policy.
However, it remains the case that culture has not
been the subject of a significant amount of
attention within urban planning practice, theory,
or education, and is therefore somewhat outside
urban planning as currently understood.2 Large-
scale cultural projects are consistently promoted as
catalysts for regeneration and as key elements of
any place-marketing campaign; the headline
attractions for the growing numbers of cultural
tourists.
Whilst it is to be welcomed that culture is
increasingly understood as a vital part of urban
development, I would ask whether the specific
contribution and potential of museums of cities is
not lost in the wider market-driven discussion of
culture, tourism and place-marketing. Cultural
planning and culture-led regeneration do,
however, provide an important part of the
contemporary context of urban planning that
museums of cities can respond to.
Museums and urban planning: found and lost
Modern urban planning was a direct response
to the nineteenth century’s rapid industrial
urbanization that required new public policy to
cope with the changing social and physical
environment of towns and cities. This period
corresponds with the world’s first museum boom
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 33
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
and the growth of international exhibitions.
The revolution in museum development would
be given greatest expression in the cities of the
industrializing nations of Europe and North
America, and diffused elsewhere in the dominions
of the colonial powers. Museums were then
viewed as civilizing and educational influences,
an early expression of a practical role for
culture in social reform. This story is now very
familiar through numerous museological texts.
What is less well-known is the role of museums
and exhibitions in the early story of urban
planning.
From the last quarter of the nineteenth
century through to the First World War, museums
and exhibitions were regularly being used as public
spaces to discuss and debate urban conditions and
social change. The pioneering urbanist, Patrick
Geddes (1854–1932), had a strong belief in the
potential of new kinds of museums, originating in
his evolutionary theories of development, which
would play an explicit role in understanding the
past, present and futures of a city: ‘It was to be
unlike any other museum movement in that
visitors to the museum became participators in its
life, its aim being the evolutionary one of helping
people and place, organism and environment, to
be brought into a closer and more fruitful
relationship.’3
His so-called Outlook Towers in
Edinburgh, and proposals for museums in all of
his city design reports are testament to his
commitment to this new museum idea. The Outlook
Tower has been described as ‘a kind of
historico-geographical astronomical
instrument’ which sought to make the connections
34 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
between local, regional, national and global
spheres.4
During the same period of embryonic town
planning, a new institution was founded in Paris in
1894. The Musée Social was more of an exhibition
and sociological laboratory on the urban question
rather than a traditional museum, and it would
help to shape early urban planning in France.5
Indeed, ‘social museums’ would also be set up
internationally, often within the context of the
growth of sociology as an academic discipline and
changing urban conditions. This includes the
Social Museum at Harvard University, established
in 1903, ‘to promote investigations of modern
social conditions and to direct the amelioration
of industrial and social life,’ in the words of its
founder, Francis Peabody. These organizations
were made up of urban activists and conceived
of in holistic, interdisciplinary and multipractice
ways. By contrast, today, city history might be
communicated through a museum exhibition,
website or television documentary; new urban
design explored within an architecture centre,
art or design museum; and social policy
developed by the legion of think tanks, political
strategy units and specialist non-governmental
organisations.
Somewhere in the course of the twentieth
century, the imaginative, ecological and integrated
approaches to urban planning and design
advocated by Geddes and others would be lost or
overtaken by world events and accelerating change
in all areas of social, technological, political and
economic life. With it would be lost a creative and
central role for museums in urban planning. This
legacy is now being revived.

The culture and practice of urban planning is
changing
If the early days of modern urban planning
were a response to industrial urbanization of the
1800s, then the beginning of the twenty-first
century should be seen as another period of
significant change requiring new approaches to
planning; not simply new tools for planning, but
changing the nature of planning and the profession
itself. This period of change and transition
represents an opportunity for museums of cities.
The changes being experienced within urban
planning are similar to those in the museums
sector which are often gathered together under the
heading ‘new museology’. Periods of external
critique and professional self-examination are
generating new theories and practices in both
domains.
To offer an albeit inadequate summation,
I think that changes in urban planning can be
best thought of as the re-evaluation of the social
and the spatial, the social and the physical nature
of cities, underpinned by economy and
environment: social in the sense of inclusion,
participation, democracy and power, civil society,
equality, identities, community and belonging;
spatial in the sense of centre and periphery,
movement, borders, boundaries, territory, region,
and the physical accommodation of social
needs. The dialectical, multiple relationships
between the social and spatial are the key
ingredients of place. Place itself can often be
revered as the Holy Grail of planning, the power of
which is invoked in various ways throughout
this article. This is of course not without its
problems.
Museums of Cities and Urban Futures
Duncan Grewcock
The character and complexion of these
changes in urban planning will of course differ
radically between the nations and regions of the
world. I present a view on changes to urban
planning from a British perspective, but which
nevertheless reflects international trends. Three
examples of change within urban planning follow.
One is theoretical, that draws together many of the
social drivers for change, and two are policy- and
practice-related developments that attempt to link
social needs to spatial form.
Cosmopolis: ‘a construction site of the mind’
Leonie Sandercock’s theory of ‘Cosmopolis’
represents an open, social approaches to planning
theory, and is one strand of change that
deliberately attempts to transgress the theoretical
and professional boundaries of traditional urban
planning.6
To set a context for her thesis, Sandercock
presents three major global socio-cultural forces
or ‘ages’ that are reshaping cities and regions:
the age of migration and multicultural citizenship;
the age of post-colonialism and indigenous and
formerly colonized people; and the age of women
and other so-called minorities, or the rise of
organized civil society. Sandercock calls for a
new planning paradigm to meet these changing
circumstances rather than relying on traditional
‘rational’ modernist theories of planning.
Advocating ‘a new approach more fluid
and responsive to context and to rapid change’, a
radical planning model is suggested, ‘to work for
structural transformation of systematic inequalities
and, in the process, to empower those who have
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 35
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
been systematically disempowered’.7 This is based
on collaborative, inclusive approaches to planning
with communities, but taken further to embrace
a more action-based, ‘insurgent’, or ‘bottom-up’
form of planning represented by experiments in
organized civil society.
The model also places strong emphasis on
the importance of narrative, story and storytelling.
Planning itself is treated as an act of place and
community storytelling; ‘a way of bringing people
together to learn about each other through the
telling of stories’.8 Narratives are powerful devices
for facilitating exploration and discovery. This is
vitally important when planning the future of
cities, precisely because in an uncertain and
complex world, we cannot truly know our final
destinations. Narrative also responds to urban
planning as an ongoing process rather than as a
finished product.
Cosmopolis does not represent a closed
theory of planning, rather it presents three
elements of lived urban experience to lead the
development of the radical model and alter the
language of planning: ‘the city of memory, of
desire, of spirit, the unruly city as opposed to the
planners’ dream of the rational city’.9 Sandercock
outlines these elements in the following terms:
‘Cities are the repositories of memories, and they
are one of memory’s texts. . . . Modernist planners
became thieves of memory. . . . Both individuals
and communities need to find new ways to connect
to the larger urban narrative. The eroticism of city
life in the broad sense of our attraction to others,
the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of
one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, the
strange, the surprising. . . . The city of desire is also
36 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
an imagined city of excitement, opportunity, and
fortune. . . . The completely profane world, the
wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent deviation
in the history of the human spirit. Perhaps it’s time
to reintroduce into our thinking about cities and
their regions the importance of the sacred, of
spirit.’10
Sandercock summarizes her analysis of the
future of urban planning in the following way,
which is worth quoting at length as one can
immediately appreciate its relevance to museums:
What the above discussion suggests is the need for
a diversity of spaces and places in the city: places loaded
with visual stimulation, but also places of quiet
contemplation, uncontaminated by commerce, where the
deafening noise of the city can be kept out so that we can
listen to the ‘noise of the stars’ or the wind and water, and
the voice(s) within ourselves. An essential ingredient of
planning beyond the modernist paradigm is a reinstatement
of inquiry about the recognition of the importance of
memory, desire, and spirit, as vital dimensions of healthy
human settlements, and a sensitivity to cultural differences in
the expressions of each.11
Sustainable communities: ‘looking at things
together’
My second example of change in urban planning is
more policy and practice related, and can be
summarized as ‘sustainable communities’.
Although a term specific to the United
Kingdom, I use it more broadly as defining an
international concern with making cities
more liveable for people, that is balanced
environmentally, socially and economically, often
within a regional or city-region planning

framework. There is a great deal of international
cross-fertilization of ideas here, and in the United
Kingdom, sustainable communities have been
influenced to some extent by North American
New Urbanism.12 According to the British
Government: ‘Sustainable communities are places
where people want to live and work, now and in
the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing
and future residents, are sensitive to their
environment, and contribute to a high quality of
life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built
and run, and offer equality of opportunity and
good services for all.’13
John Norquist put it more
straightforwardly at the Delivering Sustainable
Communities Summit held in Manchester in 2005.
A former mayor of Milwaukee, and now running
the Congress for New Urbanism, Norquist
proposed that ‘a sustainable city is a complex city’,
requiring planners to concern themselves with
‘looking at things together’ rather than what had
happened in the past 50–100 years when ‘we
decided that we would abandon most of the
knowledge we had gained for several thousand
years and simplify the city.’14
The United Kingdom’s sustainable
communities agenda was shaped in part by the
government’s 1999 Urban Task Force Report
Towards an Urban Renaissance and a subsequent
white paper, Delivering an Urban Renaissance. One
major tangible outcome of this process has been
the publication of the government’s Sustainable
Communities Plan in 2003.15 The implementation
of this plan is massive in scale and ambition,
representing a fifteen-to-twenty-year vision for
social and spatial change in England and a 22
Museums of Cities and Urban Futures
Duncan Grewcock
billion pound investment. One national focus of
delivering the plan is the Thames Gateway and the
Growth Areas.
The Thames Gateway is the first of four
major so-called Growth Areas identified within
the plan. It has as its basic premise the need to
move the economic and spatial development of
London to the east, down the River Thames.
The Thames Gateway extends for some
60 kilometres along the Thames from the London
Docklands to Southend in Essex and Sheerness
in Kent. The 2012 London Olympics will be part
of this shift in the capital’s focus. The second
main element of the plan extends development
across large parts of southern England,
predominantly focused on the growing housing
shortage in the south-east of the country, but all
planned within the more holistic and integrated
concept of sustainable communities. Of course, all
this has massive implications for conceptions of
place, community, identity and belonging. It also
raises questions as to the ability of governments,
planners, developers and designers to deliver
such an ambitious vision.
With sustainable development at its core,
the sustainable communities agenda is informing
urban and rural planning across the United
Kingdom. It is also now an emerging policy theme
alongside regeneration for the Museums, Libraries
and Archives Council, the United Kingdom’s
national strategic body for museums. Museums in
the United Kingdom are already contributing to
the principles of sustainable communities as the
sector articulates and advocates a stronger social
role. The broader concept and framework of
sustainable communities provides a new context
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 37
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
for understanding and advocating the contribution
of museums to society. It also offers a new way for
museums to connect more formally to
developments within urban planning.
Spatial planning: ‘mediating space, creating place’
My third example of change represents the
ongoing transformation of the culture and practice
of urban planning within the United Kingdom, in
the form of spatial planning. Planning practice
in the United Kingdom is in the process of
transformation for several reasons; mainly, the
impact of European initiatives on domestic
planning policy, the developing regionalization
of England, and local government modernization.
This culminated in the 2004 Planning and
Compulsory Purchase Act, effectively ushering
in the era of spatial planning. The British
Government defines spatial planning in the
following way: ‘Spatial planning goes beyond
traditional land-use planning to bring together and
integrate policies for the development and use of
land with other policies and programmes which
influence the nature of places and how they can
function.’16
Spatial planning can therefore be seen as
a more integrated approach to help deliver
sustainable communities. For some, within the
planning field, spatial planning is a stimulant for
cultural change within the profession, planners
‘must be prepared to think outside their
professional silos, and seek engagement with
relevant professionals’17 and, in the process,
increase the significance and raise the profile of the
discipline. In practice, spatial planning, which can
occur on any scale from the local neighbourhood
38 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
to the city, region or nation, translates the broad-
ranging social needs of a community as analysed
through public consultation – which could include
museums and other cultural provisions – into their
spatial implications.
Spatial planning has already been
translated into national spatial strategies in Wales,
Scotland, and Northern Ireland. All the English
regions are now in various stages of developing
Regional Spatial Strategies, which are to be
informed by needs on a more local level, as
communicated within a local authority’s
Community Strategy. Cultural planning is
integrated within community strategies at a local
level, and Regional Cultural Strategies inform
spatial change at the regional level.
There is a danger that without vision, co-
ordination and strong advocacy, museums could
become marginalized through this approach, or
their potential contributions to society flattened
out within cultural planning.18 However, the
developing contributions of museums to social
change and civic engagement suggests that the
sector could have a more creative and formal role
within the practice of spatial planning, not simply
treated as another ‘thing’ to be planned for within a
much wider process, or at worst forgotten or
ignored.
Fields in convergence: pushing the boundaries,
working on the borders
In many ways, urban planning and museums
are fields in convergence. This period of
transformation in urban planning, and some of the
trajectories of these changes, should be an

interesting prospect for the museum community.
As aspects of planning begin to move beyond their
traditional disciplinary boundaries to venture into
more cultural neighbourhoods, so this opens the
possibility of museums of cities connecting to
planning in a more creative and formal way.
There are many themes of commonality
and connection between developments in museums
and urban planning. These can perhaps best be
considered under the broad headings or goals of
integration, participation and action, as they relate
to the development, or cultivation, of place. Place
has been invoked throughout this article. Place is
used liberally again and again in all quarters but
rarely with definition. Part of the power of place
lies in its illusive nature. It is a complex, contested
topic within urbanism and geography and any
number of other disciplines.19 I cannot offer a
simple definition, but among the characteristics of
place, I wish to underline that place must be
understand as a holistic creation of the social, the
natural and the cultural, interweaving meaning
and significance, and it is therefore co-created with
and through others. Secondly, place is always in a
state of becoming. It represents rootedness and
authenticity in some ways, but openness and
change in others. Thirdly, place is both an object
and a way of looking, a physical thing and a way of
understanding ourselves and the world. It is a
work of the imagination and memory as much as
physical reality.
Museums of cities are, at their best,
nothing if not museums of place. The museum of
the city as a museum of place can legitimately
bring the issues of twenty-first-century urban life
together in an integrated and holistic way that
Museums of Cities and Urban Futures
Duncan Grewcock
other public spaces simply cannot. This is why
museums of cities face a greater set of challenges
than any museum type in the world today.
The challenge for museums of cities
In his 1972 book, What Time is this Place?, Kevin
Lynch made a powerful if brief case for the role of
museums in urban planning: ‘present change can
be made legible, past change can be explained in
place of the idyllic ‘‘once upon a time’’, continuity
with the new future can be displayed . . . self-
experiments and ‘‘museums of the future’’ can
develop the range of choices ahead. The spatial and
temporal environment can be used to shape the
attitudes towards the future that are themselves
keys to changing the world.’20
What would museums of cities be willing
to risk to change the world for the better? Risk
must be central to a social purpose for museums,
which takes on the challenge of making cities
better places to live. So, too, must be creativity.
Risk is implicit in the common features of
change in urban planning and museology:
participation, integration and action. These ideas
suggest a greater degree of openness, trust and
partnership in the future, but also a loss of
control, and more fluid relationships. It suggests
the breaking down of boundaries, of working
on the borders intellectually, socially and
spatially.
Museums of cities do not have to become
urban planners. Nor do urban planners need to
become museum workers. We are already moving
towards one another, addressing similar issues,
often in the same communities, but from very
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 39
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
different backgrounds and perspectives, often
completely unaware of each other.
If museums of cities did not already exist,
they might now need to be invented to help
understand and negotiate urban change. The unique
position that museums of cities could occupy within
urban planning is represented by the qualitative
difference of museum space as opposed to other
kinds of public space or elements of the contem-
porary mediascape. That is, as an open-ended,
trusted democratic space, that can be physically
experienced as a quarter of the city, but also used as
a site for debate, discussion and experimentation on
urban issues within the context of a city’s past,
present and future. This would see museums of
cities as a key element in the narrative of the city and
as part of its ongoing story of becoming: the
museum as a networked, distributed conversation
rather than an inward-looking institution.
However, we need to learn more from the
international context. Urban life and urban change
is experienced very differently across the globe.
The roles of city museums will of course need to
respond to local situations.
This could be the main objective of the
new international Committee for the Collections
and Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC). I
hope we are, in a very real sense, at the beginning
of a journey.
REFERENCES
Archibald, Robert R. (2004) The New Town Square: Museums and
Communities in Transition. Altamira Press.
40 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) (2000).
Our Towns and Cities: The Future – Delivering an Urban Renaissance.
HM Stationery Office, London.
Eckstein, Barbara & Throgmorton, James A. (eds.) (2003) Story and
Sustainability: Planning, Practice and Possibility for American Cities,
MIT Press.
Evans, Graeme (ed.) (2001) Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance?
Routledge.
Forester, John (1989) Planning in the Face of Power, University of
California Press.
Forester, John (1999) The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging
Participatory Planning Processes. MIT Press.
Giebelhausen, Michaela (ed.) (2003) The Architecture of the Museum:
Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Manchester University Press.
Healey, Patsy (1997) Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in
Fragmented Societies. Palgrave Macmillan.
Healey, Patsy (2003) Collaborative Planning in Perspective. Planning
Theory, 2 (2), pp.101–23.
Holston, James (ed.) (1999a) Cities and Citizenship (Public Culture).
Duke University Press.
Holston, James (1999b) Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship. In: Holston,
James (ed.) Cities and Citizenship (Public Culture), Duke University
Press.
Landry, Charles (2000) The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators.
Earthscan Publications.
Landry, Charles (2004) Riding the Rapids: Urban Life in an Age of
Complexity. Building Futures, London.
Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (2005) Communities Need
Museums, Libraries and Archives. London.
Reardon, Kenneth M. (2003) Ceola’s Vision, Our Blessing: the story of an
evolving community – university partnership in East St Louis, Illinois.
In: Eckstein, Barbara & Throgmorton, James A. (eds.) (2003) Story and
Sustainability: Planning, Practice and Possibility for American Cities.
MIT Press.

Royal Town Planning Institute (2001) A New Vision for Planning. Delivering
Sustainable Communities, Settlements and Places. London.
Sack, Robert (2003) A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good.
Routledge.
Throgmorton, James A. (2003a) Imagining Sustainable Places. In:
Eckstein, Barbara & Throgmorton, James A. (eds.) Story and Sustain-
ability: Planning, Practice and Possibility for American Cities. MIT Press.
Throgmorton, James A. (2003b) Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a
Global-scale Web of Relationships. Planning Theory, 2 (2), pp. 125–51.
UN–Habitat/Earthscan (2004a) The State of the World’s Cities, 2004/2005:
Globalization and Urban Culture.
UN–Habitat Earthscan (2004b) A Future for Urban Planning? Habitat
Debate (December 2004), 10 (4).
Urban Task Force (1999) Towards an Urban Renaissance. Final Report of
the Urban Task Force. Spon Press.
Vidler, Anthony (2003) The Space of History: modern museums from
Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier. In: Giebelhausen, Michaela (ed.) The
Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts.
Manchester University Press.
Winterson, Jeanette (1997) Gut Symmetries. Granta Books.
NOTES
1. Reader, John (2005) Cities, Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 7.
2. Kunzmann, Klaus R. (2004) Culture, Creativity and Spatial Planning,
Town Planning Review, 75 (4), p. 383.
3. Meller, Helen (1994) Patrick Geddes. Social Evolutionist and City
Planner, Routledge, p. 89.
4. Welter, Volker M. (2003) The Return of the Muses: Edinburgh as
Museion. In Giebelhausen, Michaela (ed.), The Architecture of the
Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, Manchester University
Press.
5. Horne, Janet R. (2002) A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The
Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State, Duke University Press.
Museums of Cities and Urban Futures
Duncan Grewcock
6. Sandercock, L. (1997) Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural
Cities, Academy Press; Sandercock, L. (2004) Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities
in the Twenty-first Century, Continuum International Publishing Group.
7. Sandercock (1997) op. cit., p. 29; Sandercock (2004), op. cit., p. 97.
8. Sandercock, L. (2003) Out of the Closet: the importance of stories and
storytelling in planning practice, Planning Theory and Practice, 4 (1) pp.
11–28.
9. Sandercock (1997) op. cit., p. 207.
10. Sandercock, (2004) op. cit., p. 225.
11. Ibid., p. 227.
12. Grant, Jill (2006) Planning the Good Community: New Urbanisms in
Theory and Practice, Routledge, p. 112; see also, Hebbert, Michael (2003)
New Urbanism – the Movement in Context, Built Environment, 29 (3),
pp. 193–209.
13. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005a), at www.odpm.gov.uk/.
14. Norquist, J., (2005) Comments in Plenary Panel Debate, What does a
successful sustainable community look like? Sustainable Communities
Summit, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2003) Sustainable
Communities: Building for the Future, at www.odpm.gov.uk/.
15. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005a), op. cit.
16. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005b) Planning Policy Statement
1: Delivering Sustainable Development.
17. Tewdwr-Jones, Mark (2004) Spatial Planning: principles, practices and
cultures. Journal of Environmental and Planning Law, 57, (5), p. 16.
18. Gibbs, Nick (2004) Planning for the Future: learning from the past.
Cultural Trends, 13 (3), No. 51, pp. 37–39.
19. Cresswell, Tim (2004) Place: A Short Introduction, Blackwell.
20. Lynch, Kevin (1972) What Time is This Place?, MIT Press, p. 117.
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 41
 ª Marina TAURUS

5. Art expressions in the city: Wall painting, rue du Renard, Paris. ª «Nemo».

42 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
Museum, Motion and Emotion
in the City
by François Côté and Philippe Dubé (LAMIC)
Geoffrey Edwards and Marie-Louise Bourbeau (Learning contexts)

François Côté is co-founder and co-ordinator of the Laboratoire de Muséologie et

d’Ingénierie de la Culture (LAMIC) at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Philippe Dubé is
currently heading a postgraduate museum studies programme at Laval University. Geoffrey
Edwards is the Canada Research Chair in cognitive geomatics at Laval University. Marie Louise
Bourbeau is a lyric artist who collaborates in research projects at the conjecture of the
worlds of art and science.

The International Committee for the Collections

and Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC)’s
invitation to explore the question of the city
museum proved to be an exceptional occasion to
develop two of our principal interests: the future of
the museum and the scientification of museology.
After all, if the museum is a total medium where
any contents and communication modes can be
mixed, the museum of the city is certainly one of
its most complex forms and, perhaps, one of the
most difficult to study. So, first, we approached this
object by trying to integrate it in our reflections
about the new communication tools of museums,
and about museology. Secondly, we invited a
specialist of space cognition, professor Geoffrey
Edwards and his collaborator, opera singer Marie-
Louise Bourbeau, to consider the question of the
city museum through their own perspective.

The Museum of the city and digital space: the

LAMIC as a mediator

Since around the 1960s, the museum has

constituted a key space for the demystification of

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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
our ‘new medias’. In eras when those technologies
were rare, people could go to the museum and
experience firsthand encounters with video,
informatics, audio guides, multi-screen
projections and IMAX (image maximum), etc.
Beyond this idea of collective initiation, the
museum world, through interpretation, children’s
museums, science museums and, gradually,
museums at large, became a major specialist in the
creation of interactive ‘hands-on’ environments.
However, now that the internet is leaving its early
childhood, the question of informational and
interactive spaces, of ubiquitous access to
information, thanks to various more or less
portable and visible technologies, represents one of
the most important challenges for information
technologies research and development. In fact, we
are slowly migrating from the mouse/keyboard/
screen paradigm to the paradigm of hypermediatic
environments. From basic tactile interfaces to
multisensorial immersions. And from flat two-
dimensional representations of realities, to a
permanent in situ interactive map at a one-to-one
scale. In short, an occasion to position the museum
of the city, the museum of territory par excellence,
as a perfect case-study of our communicational
challenges.
To this technological context, we can add
the fact that psychologists and educationists have
proved that teaching is optimized by a total
integration of the human body in the learning
experience. And, finally, let us mention the
proliferation of low-cost means of creation and
diffusion of digital content. This results in the
omnipresence of self-expression and self-
exhibition on the internet (blogs, podcast, video
portals, social-tagging or ‘folksonomy’) and the
44 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
progressive enrichment of the globe by a new net
of personal georeferenced information (Google
Maps, Google Earth). What is there to say of it all?
That the Western world, in its communication,
training and leisure modes is embracing the idea of
the informational, immersive, intermedial and
interactive spaces developed by the museum since
its origins, in particular the relatively recent North
American museum, well versed in period-rooms,
in-vivo interpretation and multimedia. As for the
city museum of today, because of the above-
mentioned richness, it represents, in our view, the
best museum format for experiencing new media,
educational and entertainment approaches.
This leads us, however, to an alarming
report: these various elements should in theory
position museums, and particularly city museums,
as major references in the information technologies
(IT) world. However, dealing with those questions
ourselves on a daily basis, we can only deplore
the weakness of museums in this area. There are
certainly important exceptions, like works of the
Digicult program1 or the participation of national
heritage authorities on international committees,
such as those concerning Semantic Web, 3-D
imaging, etc. Nevertheless, in general, museums do
not seem very conscious of the situation. They also
seem little aware of how they could reposition
themselves at the centre of some of today’s most
important debates. However, if the city museum,
through its parallel use of exhibition and urban
territory as communication mediums, should
represent one of the best prototypes of our future
digital spaces, how can we actualize that potential
and let people know about it? Since museums live
with daily requirements which often divert them
from such questions, can museology as a scientific

François Côté, Philippe Dubé, Geoffrey Edwards and Marie-Louise Bourbeau
field dedicated to the study of the museum
contribute to these objectives?
The museum as a cultural actor
The starting point of our interrogation originated
about three years ago, at the very birth of our
laboratory, the LAMIC (Laboratoire de Muséologie
et d’Ingénierie de la Culture), in a radical criticism
of museology, a theory of the museum which
seemed to us to go nowhere on an epistemological
level. From our point of view, museology was,
and still is, in a kind of theoretical dead end where
the focus on the museum prevents, to a certain
point, the reflection on it, being not sufficiently
inspired by a larger picture. At the time, we had the
impression of being trapped, confined. So, as good
radicals, we had to return to the roots of the
museum, way upstream of its functions (to collect,
to study, to diffuse, etc.). This voyage was not easy.
We lost ourselves literally in the labyrinthian
mazes of definitions which describe the museum
more than they explain it. At the end of this first
investigation, we were led to conclude that the
transmission of culture is the ontological base of
the museum, a base that not only allows us to
understand it, but also to locate it among other
actors of the cultural sector.
However, once this was formulated, it
became necessary to develop methodologies that
would eventually give us the ability to test it. Here,
the launching of the CAMOC was the first occasion
to experiment a mediation approach new to the
LAMIC, by inviting a geomatics specialist of
international reputation to reflect about the city
museum with museum professionals. In fact, after
different attempts during the last years, we came to
Museum, Motion and Emotion in the City
the conclusion that one of the most interesting
ways of practising museology was to grant more
room to transversality and multidisciplinarity, and
indeed let others discuss our object. From
specialists of the museum, we become more and
more agents between museum practioners and
scientists from all fields. In short, considering the
complexity of the museum, we prefer to support
such meetings rather than to claim all the studies
for ourselves. In this sense, museology at the
LAMIC is a meeting place instead of an exclusive
domain.
So where is the city museum going and
how do we study it? It is principally these various
specialists we aim to approach who will tell us. In
the end, our intentions are to better understand
some aspects of the city, the challenges of its
interpretation, and the methods capable of
transferring the results of these researches to
museum practice. After expressing the origins and
objectives of this present work, we can move on
to cognitive science in the context of museum
environments. The idea of convergence in science
leads Bruno Latour to write that ‘The relevance of
an object of research is precisely its capacity to
federate, in broader and broader associations, an
increasingly large number of actors.’2 We have
thus begun a project which we hope will be able to
reveal the true relevance of the city museum.
Museums and learning contexts
It can be argued that the world today is in the early
stages of a major reorganization of how learning
occurs. The development of the internet into a vast
repository of knowledge, available freely to anyone
with a minimum of computer competence,
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
combined with the emergence of a variety of
collaborative arrangements for discussing and
sharing both knowledge and learning, including
wikis, blogs, forums, etc. has already begun to
exercise pressure on our existing educational
arrangements (Schank, 2002). Increasingly, in
addition to selecting a school, one will be able to
shop for individualized learning environments at
all levels, from children, through adolescents, to
young adults and on through life-long learning
contexts.
Furthermore, as a result of new
developments in cognitive science, our
understanding of how people learn is also
undergoing dramatic change. The discovery of
mirror neurons, for example, has brought us
further along the path of understanding the extent
to which learning is rooted in our experience of
our own bodies (Dobbs, 2006). Mirror neurons are
single neurons that fire when we observe particular
movements or emotions in other people, in
ourselves, or when we imagine these movements or
emotionally expressive states. Hence, we now
know that learning is fundamentally and literally
‘embodied’. Sitting large numbers of people
passively within a classroom is a far cry from an
effective learning environment. The existence of
mirror neurons confirms that we learn by doing, by
watching other people doing, and by thinking
about their actions and our own. Furthermore, as
we relate other people’s emotional states to our
own, mirror neurons also help us to learn about
each other.
Interestingly, emotion and motion are
hence linked. They both entail a cognitive
mechanism allowing us to switch from a first-
46 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
person perspective (understanding our own
emotions and movements) to a third-person
perspective (using this understanding to identify
emotions and motion in others). Furthermore,
they are both evoked by exposure to relevant
contexts, and, indeed, to contextualized objects. In
the embodied learning environments of the future,
we shall learn how to use objects and contexts,
combined with motion and emotive expression,
to ensure that new forms of learning take place.
Museums are poised to take advantage of
these changes, if they are ready to accept the
challenge. Modern museums already provide
embodied learning experiences that address all age
groups. Today, with regard to mainstream
educational experiences, these learning situations
are viewed as peripheral and complementary. How
will they evolve? Not towards centrality; instead,
the learning contexts will become more peripheral.
It may be a mistake for museums to attempt to
position themselves more centrally in society – if
not a mistake, then certainly wasted effort. Our
society is reorganizing itself, is ‘peripheralizing’
itself,3 and museums that learn to take advantage
of their existing peripheral roles more effectively,
will experience both growth and, paradoxically, a
more important role in people’s lives.
A movement from centre to periphery
The internet itself is one of the main catalysts for
this movement, but it is far from being alone.
There is no ‘centre’ within the internet – all is
peripheral.4 In addition, the current necessary
movement towards building sustainable
communities requires a greater circulation of ideas,
people, cultures and ways of seeing. This global

François Côté, Philippe Dubé, Geoffrey Edwards and Marie-Louise Bourbeau
movement towards more circulation is a
movement towards a more peripheral focus.
One of the characteristics of the periphery
is that it is less about place, and more about
people. Place is a centralist notion, and one that
has predominated history and our living
arrangements for centuries. Today, along with the
changes in learning arrangements, Place is losing
its hold over us. Paradoxically, cities have become
more important, but cities are environments in
which place has less power than it did in rural
living arrangements. Increasingly, cities around the
world are recognizing the similarities in their
functional environments and are learning to
collaborate more effectively with each other. In a
sense, the collection of cities around the world is
becoming its own Periphery, and circulation
between cities as well as within cities is growing.
Within this new environment, the building in
which a service is located will become less and less
important. Museums, and especially city museums,
which are often very building-centric, need to
recognize this and learn to operate more effectively
within the broader circulatory environment of
the city – establish more satellite locations, work
with local communities to transform parts of
cities into ‘living and breathing museums’, and so
forth.
Moreover, the shift from centre to
periphery also involves a shift from intellect to
emotion. Emotion is a peripheral function in terms
of the body’s functionality – it arises from the
body’s activity and operates through chemical
changes and not just through neurological activity.
It is not that we are giving up intellect, rather we
are shifting to a greater emphasis on the rational
Museum, Motion and Emotion in the City
role of emotion. In his book Descartes’ Error,
Damasio (1996) showed that emotions are critical
to true rationality – individuals who have lost their
emotions through brain damage also appear to
have lost their ability to plan and to reason
effectively about other people. In the peripheral
world, in a world of circular movement, a rational
presence of emotions is a way to ensure that we
stay connected to each other.
Indeed, in addition to changing the way we
learn and feel, we are witnessing a change in the
way we view ourselves, in our personal sense of
identity. Identity has been defined as a set of
strategies that seek to maintain the individual over
time, composed of a continuum including history,
the present and a planned future. Identity also
includes a set of processes for updating and
actualizing itself. In the past, identity has been
viewed as the result of an accumulation of
experiences that serve to reinforce our sense of
who we are. We have therefore invested much in
preserving a historical and social record of this.
However, our identities are constantly challenged
and our understanding of identity is becoming less
focused on history. As we are increasingly
contextualized via different social and cultural
environments, we experience a constant re-
construction of who we are in the present. This
results in a shift in values and strategies, opening
the way to a less compartmentalized self-
reconstruction. Museums need to understand this
shift in focus and position themselves more
strategically with regard to the newer paradigm.
Are museums committed to preserving history,
or are they environments that enable identity
construction and its re-construction? If they
are the former, they may be doomed to diminish
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
as the world transforms itself. If, however, they
play along with the transformation, they will
find themselves becoming more relevant, not
less so.
Identity and embodied learning environments
We have mentioned the important role of mirror
neurons in learning. As indicated in the opening
paragraphs, they are of critical importance for
museums. Particular mirror neurons fire when we
perform very specific motor actions such as
reaching for a spoon to stir our coffee. The same
mirror neuron will fire if we watch someone else
reach for the spoon, or if we close our eyes and
think about either them or us reaching for the
spoon. If we reach for a spoon in order to eat our
ice cream, a different mirror neuron will fire.
Mirror neurons respond to context. However, in
addition to these properties, the mirror neurons for
‘reaching for the spoon’ may fire simply when we
are presented with the spoon itself in an
appropriately situated context, whether we think
about reaching for it or not. In addition, the
neuron will fire if we describe the act of reaching
for the spoon (Dobbs 2006).
In a sense, this comes close to answering
one of the central questions of museology – why do
we collect objects? We collect objects, in addition
to historical and cultural reasons, because they
stimulate our mirror neurons – many objects
stimulate many different mirror neurons. Such
stimulations are usually pleasant. Hence the
question ‘What do I do?’ takes on a new light – it
concerns not only our actions, but also the objects
upon which we act. Our learning of the world is
very elegant – objects are associated with our own
48 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
physical actions, and hence we understand the
world, even the world of objects, as a function of
our own presence in the world.
The role of preserving collections,
therefore, is not simply preserving them for the
sake of the objects themselves, but for the
relationships that objects have with regard to
ourselves. This brings us back to the shifting
nature of identity – objects are part of the ways that
we challenge our own reconstructions, they are not
always about our historical origins.
Presence and the role of emotion
A final aspect of learning experiences we would
like to discuss is the idea of presence. Presence is
currently a preoccupation for people working in
so-called ‘mixed reality’ environments – perceptual
environments that combine real-world and virtual-
reality elements within a single perceptual
experience. The term has been used to describe
both the sense of feeling that one is ‘really’ within
a virtual space, as well as the sense that we are
interacting with a human-like agency.
Our sense of presence, from either
meaning, is very likely rooted in the empathetic
relationship that emerges from mirror neurons,
that is, the bridging function that allows us to
associate our own emotional states with behaviours
in another that evoke these emotional states.
Indeed, much of the emotional projection that
characterizes psycho-analytical treatments may be
rooted in this empathetic property of mirror
neurons – that is, emotional projection is an
inevitable and natural by-product of our cognitive
understanding of other humans.

François Côté, Philippe Dubé, Geoffrey Edwards and Marie-Louise Bourbeau
Hence the idea of presence is rooted in
feeling – both our ‘feeling’ of being in a complete
space, and our feeling of interacting with another
emotive being. Not only feeling, but also emotion.
This has enormous implications for design, both in
real and virtual environments. Whenever we
provide a set of objects with a set of behaviours
that express an emotive state, then we imbue that
set of objects with a sense of presence. Whenever
we provide people with environments that they
may view as being emotionally connected to
themselves, then we also provide them with a sense
of presence. Presence, as opposed to place, is a
peripheral concept. Museums need to be more
conscious of creating exhibitions (and embodied
learning environments) that are imbued with one
or more presences, as these engage us more fully
than do situations that are empty of presence. This,
in a way, is a means of putting more ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’
back into our experiences of the world, as Presence
also has mystical evocations.
We should like to emphasize that
museums are extremely well positioned to explore
these new learning contexts, provided they are able
to become more, not less, peripheral, to move into
the city and establish a circulating or moving
presence, and to open themselves to the relevance
of emotions.
REFERENCES
Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the
Human Brain, Putnam, New York.
Dobbs, D. (2006) A Revealing Reflection. Scientific American Mind, 17 (2),
pp. 22–7.
Museum, Motion and Emotion in the City
Edwards, G. & Bourbeau, M.L. (2005) Image schemata – a guiding
principle for multi-modal expression in performance design. International
Journal of Performance Design and Digital Media, 1(3), pp. 189–206.
Johnson, M. (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis for Meaning,
Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Schank, R.C. (2002) Are we going to get smarter? In: Brockman, J. (ed.),
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century.
Vintage Books, New York, pp. 206–15.
NOTES
1. http://www.digicult.info.
2. Latour, Bruno. (2001) Le métier de chercheur: regard de l’anthropo-
logue [The Profession of Researcher: an anthropologist’s perspective].
Editions INRA, Paris, p. 35
3. Support for this idea is complex and comes from a variety of sources.
A detailed argument for this process is in preparation. In a nutshell, our
world has been centrally organized because it has been expanding via
population growth – the new world will be peripheral because population
growth is reaching a plateau. In a highly connected world of zero-growth,
there is no clearly defined centre. This will lead to changes at many levels
in our social and economic organizations.
4. Throughout this article we have used terms such as ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ in a clearly ‘marked’ way. These terms are actually a subset of
a collection of terms called ‘image schemata’ (Johnson 1987). Image
schemata encapsulate basic and universal relationships that are rooted in
our embodied experience of the world. In addition, image schemata have
been identified in all sensory modalities, and hence serve as a kind of
bridging or integrative language for designing complete human
experiences. As such, they serve as a powerful tool in the development of
embodied learning environments. In related work, we have shown how
they may be used to facilitate design in the performing arts (Edwards &
Bourbeau 2005).
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 49
 The City Museum and its Values
by Tatiana Gorbacheva

Tatiana Gorbacheva, a historian with more than thirty years of museum experience, is the
deputy director of the Museum Association ‘Moscow City Museum’, and the author and
co-author of more than twenty publications in the field of museology (catalogues, journals and
scientific publications).

Over the last ten years, specialists from city

museums and capital museums have gathered
together to search for the identity and new
missions of these museums. More recently, we
were active participants of a new process in
museology, and today we are witnessing new
accomplishments in our practice. With the
creation of a new international committee of
ICOM, the Committee for Collections and
Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC), we are
beginning to find our own new directions in city
museum activities.

I would like to discuss three aspects of

contemporary activities of city museums, based
on activities of the Moscow City Museum and
international experience: first, the relationship
between the museum and its urban environment;
secondly, the change of the city over time; and
thirdly, the relationship between the museum and
society today.

In the course of our research, before the

establishment of CAMOC, we came to the
conclusion that urbanology, a new science
about the development of urban culture is very
close to museum activities. The development of a
city and a city museum have in common that
they both result from a strong individuality and
unity.

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Museums and urban environments
The city’s unique features depend on the
peculiarity of nature, landscape, building, and of
the cultural variety of its communities. The urban
process is not only continuing but quickening and
the number of megalopolises in the world grows.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
population of Moscow was 2 million. Today it is
more than 13 million covering an area of
13 square kilometres.
In this context, the city museum cannot
remain within the confines of its traditional
activities, formed in the past century. During the
twentieth century, the activity of the city museum
traditionally occupied one building or one
complex located in the city centre, and the basis of
the museum exhibitions was the artefact. The city
museum remained valued, reflecting a city’s image,
expressing its essence and helping its inhabitants
in their self-determination. The new museum
practice is based on working with space and wide
areas. This means that many urban museums are
now complex structures, which consist not only of
individual buildings, but also entire urban
territories and settlements.
In the last decade, the Moscow City
Museum has created seven branches of activity,
some of which arose in regions far from the
historical city centre.
The creation of the Museum of Culture at
the Kuzminki Country Estate is one example. An
estate was a basic and ageless type of housing for
Moscow inhabitants. This form of traditional urban
building was practically destroyed in the twentieth
The City Museum and its Values
Tatiana Gorbacheva
century, but several estates partially survived as
museums.
Kuzminki was originally the rich
out-of-town estate belonging to Prince Golitsyn.
During the twentieth century the estate was
nationalized; economic life in it ceased and a
scientific institute occupied the palace. Modern
buildings absorbed the entire suburban area
and destroyed its landscape. Fortunately, the
estate’s park landscape, the area of rivers and ponds,
and historical buildings were preserved. In 1999,
the restoration of architectural monuments and
the topographical zone of the Kuzminki estate
began. It was clear to us that it would be impossible
to re-create all elements of farm life on the estate,
or the interiors that had been lost after 100 years.
In line with the contemporary concept of
museum development, we have decided to form
a museum centre that develops non-traditional
forms of museum practice, based on the revival of
traditions of estate life and culture, and involving
the museum in contemporary social life.
Exhibitions devoted to history, ethnography and
everyday life were organized at Kuzminki. With
the support of the Moscow government, the
museum conducts an annual festival of flower
gardens and an international music festival, ‘Music
of Noble Estates’, which led to the concept of the
‘Park of Historical Entertainments’ on the estate.
We have also re-created the ‘Russian School of
Riding’ in the stables.
Interest in the museum programmes has
considerably grown. More than 70 per cent of the
visitors interviewed confirmed that they regularly
attend the programmes of the Kuzminki museum
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
and spend their leisure-time with their family here.
We operate with the concept of ‘heritage’ rather than
of museum objects to create images of the historical
periods, with subjects such as ‘The Country Estate
Fashion’ or ‘Childhood on the Estate’.
The City Museum of Helsinki is, in my
view, a good example of museum interpretation of
urban space. The city museum has established
branches consisting of entire blocks of the
working-class district, but also an urban power
station and tram depot, and other municipal
services buildings.
This museum reveals a specific trend in
the development of museums: the structure of
museums has become complex and composite,
and they are no longer composed of buildings
and artefacts, but encompass heritage as a whole.
The museum interpretation of space provides
new value to the sense of the place and of
inhabiting it.
The city develops over time
Time is a very important philosophical category,
which directly influences the activity of the city
museum. The museum reflects the past, present
and future development of the city itself and its
community. Traditionally, as a rule, museums
reflected historical development, and were less
interested in the present and future.
Today, our views have changed, first of all,
from the pressure of public expectations. Urban
society worries considerably about the contemporary
state of the environment, ways of overcoming crises
of development, and the means of the future city.
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In the urban environment and urban life, time is not
divided into the past, present and future – it is
united. The here and now, heritage, contemporary
life and spots of future are presented in urban life.
Modern offices, banks and stores are located in
old buildings where some museums are also opened.
At the same time, projects of urban development
are conducted, new ideas are discussed publicly
and the future of the city is determined.
In 2001, the Moscow City Museum
initiated an international scientific exhibition
project, the Moscow International Museum Forum,
on a periodic basis. Museums, archives, libraries
and public centres participate in the forum. In
2005, we examined the public and historical issue
of the victory over fascism, and the end of the
Second World War.
The exhibition project, The World After the
War, did not reflect the events of war, but its
consequences in Moscow and in the country,
concerning the development of European states
and changes in global policy. More than twenty
museums in Moscow, Russia and Europe
participated in the forum. Eleven exhibitions took
place in the course of the month, along with
scientific conferences and public events.
The city community
The Moscow City Museum now works closely with
the city community and not only with its visitors.
Today, museum programmes are carried out
beyond the limits of our exhibitions in the urban
space, and we actively participate in ‘City Days’
and in ‘Moscow’s Historical and Cultural Heritage
Days’. We are also concerned with the social and

6. The celebration of City Day in September 2005 in Moscow.
moral problems of urban development. Problems
such as criminality, sectarian and ethnic tension
or terrorism should be themes of exhibitions for
city museums. We believe that a number of
humanitarian values are at the core of our mission:
the preservation of the living environment, the
negation of violence and extremism, assistance in
adapting to urban life, and the defence of cultural
diversity.
We are convinced that the social mission of
museums is in fact to affirm humanitarian values in
the life of the city community.
Urban life, especially life in capital cities,
undergoes the rapid influence of globalization. The
The City Museum and its Values
Tatiana Gorbacheva
ª Moscow City Museum/photo Reshunov Vitaly
6
global networks of communication, world fashion
and especially, the development of mass culture
directly threaten the retention of the diversity of
culture in large cities. The new generation of
immigrants or steady ethnic diasporas, consciously
preserve their own cultural traditions. The mission
of city museums is to help these people to express
themselves and to preserve the material artefacts of
their culture in museum collections. The Moscow
City Museum helped, for example, to maintain an
old Russian habit: the playing of the Russian
traditional instrument, the harmonica.
Before the early twentieth century this
tradition existed in Moscow, especially in the
working-class urban outskirts. This cultural
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
7. The excursion programme of the Kuzminki Russian Country Estate Museum, a Museum Association’s branch of the Moscow City Museum.
tradition was almost completely lost for two
generations. Several years ago, after obtaining an
old collection of harmonicas as a gift, the Moscow
City Museum created a branch called the Museum
of the Russian harmonica, developed the scientific
programme of reconstructing the authentic
technique of playing this instrument and
developed the project for the musical festival,
‘Harmonica – the Soul of Russia’. Today this is a
popular international museum festival, which
concludes with a concert in one of Moscow’s most
prestigious concert halls. Hundreds of musicians
and thousands of listeners take part in this festival.
Our new committee helps with museum contacts
and is achieving an international scale of
collaboration.
54 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
ª Moscow City Museum/photo Reshunov Vitaly
7
By way of conclusion, I would like to state
a number of salient points that emerged from
our experience in Moscow: the city museum is
currently developing into a complex structure,
including different objects and urban spaces. The
dialogue of the museum with the city community,
and conducting large-scale social programmes and
projects has become the main task of museum
activities, which are based on humanitarian values
and resist ideas of destruction and violence.
Museums change traditional methods of work,
transforming into public museums centres of
social life and culture. And this evolution of our
museum practice is caused by the very dynamism
of city life.
A Museum without Walls
by Helena Friman

Helena Friman obtained her M.A. in history, literature and Scandinavian languages in 1967.
She has been manager of the Stockholm Education project since 1999. She has also been a
member of the Swedish Urban Environment Council since 2001.

A museum is part of society’s collective memory.

A museum acquires, documents, preserves and
communicates objects and other evidence of human culture
and environment. It develops and promotes knowledge and
offers experiences appealing to all our senses.
It is open to the public and contributes to the
development of society.
The purpose of the museum is knowledge for the
citizens.
(Swedish museum definition, 1994)

Swedish cultural policy is based on an

old tradition in the Nordic countries of adult
education or ‘people’s education’, folkbildning in
Swedish. Culture is thus perceived as an
instrument for achieving social change, and equal
access to culture has been regarded as a right.

Since 2005, free entrance to the national

museums has increased the number of visitors by
more than 160 per cent. Several other museums
have followed, including the City Museum of
Stockholm.

I consider that one of the most important

issues for the future of European museums is their
relationship with the public. Competition for
people’s attention has become extreme and today
museums must compete for visitors with many
different attractions, from the commercial
entertainment industry to enterprises selling

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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
8. The Stockholm City Libraries constructed by the architect Gunnar Asplund.
clothes, gifts and furniture. For most museums, it
is not enough to open well-designed exhibitions
and employ talented marketing staff; they must
adapt a new strategy and use their resources with
the public in a more creative way.
The museum and the city
I worked for many years as an educator in the
Stockholm City Museum. A source of inspiration
for our work was the philosophy behind eco-
museums, which asserts that a place or a district
56 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
ª Helena Friman
8
together with all its objects is a kind of cultural
property, property that has nothing to do with
property in its legal meaning.
George Henri Rivière, together with
Hugues de Varines, perhaps the most important
museologists behind the idea of eco-museums,
wrote, in 1985, that the eco-museum could work
as a mirror in which the local population views
itself to discover its own image, a mirror in which
it seeks an explanation of the territory to which it
is attached, and of the populations that have

ª Hans Nordlinder
9 We therefore used the museum as a base
9. A group of park-workers and street cleaners in a district of
Stockholm built in the 1990s with post-modern architecture.
preceded: a mirror that the local population holds
up in front of visitors.
In 1991, I met Kenneth Hudson, a man
who loves museums, but who challenged,
provoked and upset museum professionals with
irritating questions of museum practice, the
culture of the élite, and the occasional misuse of
public money. In an article entitled ‘The Great
European Museum’ (1993) he wrote: ‘From a
museum point of view, I see every town, village,
landscape, country and even continent as a Great
Museum in which everyone can discover their own
roots and see how they fit into the chain of human
activities which stretches back over the centuries.
Scattered over the Great Museum are the
institutions which we have chosen to call
museums. The real reason for a museum’s
existence is to make life more interesting and more
rewarding for its customers.’ This statement
echoed my own understanding of the museum’s
role. I worked many years at the City Museum of
Stockholm with the same idea: that the museum’s
A Museum without Walls
Helena Friman
main task and arena are the city itself; and that
the museum must take part in the discussion
about changes in the built environment and the
social life of the city. The museum should achieve
this role, not just by collecting and reflecting
objects and actions, but through the exchange of
ideas, communication, and confrontation. The
museum was there mainly to make the citizens
curious about the city and the world outside its
walls.
for exploration of the city and introduced new
methods for museum education. The predominant
model of guided tours for school classes was
abandoned in favour of more varied forms and
longer visits. Visits were always combined with
outdoor explorations of parts of the city; either led
by a museum educator or, for the teenagers, on
their own, in small groups. This combination of
the close study of the exhibitions, and all the
movement, concreteness and reality out in the city,
had a powerful effect on the children and young
people. We started to work with adults in a similar
way.
Stockholm Education
In the 1990s, after many years at the Stockholm
City Museum and some years at the Open Air
Museum at Skansen, I had the opportunity to
realize a dream: to leave the traditional museum
world and build something new, a museum
without walls in the streets of Stockholm. The
project got off to a flying start thanks to the culture
ministers of Europe who chose Stockholm as
the cultural capital of Europe in 1998. Within
the context of Stockholm’98, I was able to launch
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
the project in autumn 1996, and start to reach
people in new ways. I wished for a cultural project
with a minimum of administration, premises,
meetings and equipment, and a maximum of
flexibility and closeness to the participants and to
the partner institutions.
The development of a city has much to do
with the people who work in it. Many of those who
work in the transport system, in public cleaning or
in the parks wear uniforms and are thereby
automatically regarded as representatives of the
city, a role that they share with front-of-house
staff of public libraries, conveniences, hotels,
museums and other cultural and public
institutions. They are asked all kinds of questions,
and thus, in addition to their own duties, their
work has an educational and a social component,
which often involves a great strain. It can be
tiresome to be a representative of the authorities,
as a uniformed person automatically always
becomes, particularly for those coming from
outlying areas of Sweden, or from distant
countries. If their work situation is full of stress
and conflict at the same time, it is rather easy for
them to regard the general public and visiting
tourists as a troublesome element rather than the
most important part of their work.
‘Stockholm Education’ has been created for
these occupational groups and is tailored to meet
their different needs and interests. The target
group was and still is the city’s front-of-house staff,
all the people who, in various ways, work in and
around the streets of Stockholm, within its
infrastructure. Police officers, bus drivers, the
street cleaners or traffic wardens are not frequent
museum visitors. We might conclude that they are
58 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
not interested in the history of Stockholm, the arts,
architecture or town planning. I wish to question
this. Why should they not be interested in history,
their workplace. And what if the museums met
them where they are: in the streets of the city?
What if the museum showed interest in them,
not only as visitors, but because they do an
important service for the city. City museums need
to change in order to address this approach which
applied to our project, with the desire to break
down cultural and institutional barriers, and
challenge common museum prejudices about who
is interested and who is not. Perhaps it is
traditional museums that are excluded by those
who choose not to visit them.
Partners
We consider that the partners for Stockholm
Education are all those who are responsible for the
in-service training and education of staff in the
participating institutions, companies and
enterprises. We approach, for example, directors of
bus companies and try to convince them of the
value to the company of drivers’ knowing more
about the city and the streets they drive along.
Other partners for the project are the cultural
institutions, museums, theatres, libraries, schools,
churches, restaurants, and also – in order to gain
access to interesting places and buildings – a large
network of individuals.
However, Stockholm Education’s main
partner, also the starting point for every visit, is the
Stockholm City Museum, located in a seventeenth-
century building. At the museum, participants
study the history and development of the city, from
its foundation in the thirteenth century, up to the

present day, using exhibitions, paintings, maps,
the library and the archives. The group then moves
on to the streets. The main method is the
exploration of the city as it is the source, the
archive and the instrument.
A city can be a great educational instrument
in itself. It is free of charge and in constant
evolution. It is confusing, full of knowledge, and
adventure. We explore it together. We hunt for
traces of those who lived there before us.
It’s your town
Another important motive for the project is to
open up the city for the participants so that they
increasingly come to regard Stockholm as a place
that belongs to them. We are able to enter old
amusement palaces and cinemas, now transformed
into Free Churches or computer shops. We use
churches, parish houses, restaurants and libraries
as informal seminar rooms. We study sketches of
well-known public sculptures and monuments.
The ‘students’ are not trained to become
guides. That is not the point. The idea is that if
they have a basic knowledge of the history and
development of the city, if they are at home in their
own parts of town, then they will feel bolder and
become ready to meet the general public and
tourists in a more responsive way. Contact with
history and culture has that effect on people.
Sometimes the first meeting in the museum
is not easy. The participants’ can have a wait-and-
see attitude, and, especially when there are only
men in the group, the attitude can almost be
considered hostile. But they develop confidence
A Museum without Walls
Helena Friman
and a growing interest. This new attitude and
competence certainly influences their perception
of their own role in the city, and this is of course
valuable, both for the employers and the
companies, as well as for the city. Their reactions
and viewpoints are documented in evaluations,
questionnaires, and interviews. Many of them
stated afterwards that their working days became
more entertaining and ‘fun’. They say that they do
not know much about the city, but that is not true.
They know a considerable amount and they know
different things. There is also a deeper meaning
behind Stockholm Education. It is the idea of the
good, open society, where one feels secure, is met
with knowledge and respect, and the intellect is
activated. It is a question of democracy.
‘I find my job more entertaining now.
The more you know about your city, the more
interested you get. Now I look around all the time,
see how the houses are built, talk about architects
and styles. I’ve become stimulated.’
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 59
 Humanitas in Toronto: a project
story
by Rita Davies

Rita Davies is currently executive director of culture for the city of Toronto, Canada. In her role
as executive director of the Toronto Arts Council (TAC), from 1984 to 1999, she tried to
ensure continued support for the arts through municipal investment in the cultural life of the
city. To provide direction for the new Culture Division, Rita Davies commissioned a Culture
Plan that will define the building blocks for the creation of a new division within the city of
Toronto.

It is simple, we like it complex. Not needlessly

complicated, but nuanced, layered, rich. And we
want that from our lives, our friends, our cities and
certainly from our museums!

We are well beyond the museums of old,

those mausoleums filled with the dead calm of the
victor’s story. In a difficult, multipolar world we
can no longer afford to present reality from a
limited, single point of view. Simplistic thinking is
boring at best and dangerous at worst. In order to
build and sustain livable, interesting cities, in order
to curate our future, we must present our past and
present in a way that engages all our citizens in
feeling that they, their ancestors, and their children
are legitimate and honoured characters in the
complex, evolving story we call history. Toronto
is planning to do just that with our Humanitas
initiative and we think this new city museum will
be a cornerstone of the wave of city building that
Toronto is presently blessed with.

So what is Humanitas? The simple answer

is that it will be a new and innovative city museum
on Toronto’s waterfront that will tell Toronto’s
stories to our own citizens and to the world. You

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can easily guess, however, from the very scope
of the word ‘Humanitas’ that my bare-bones
description only hints at the possibilities.
Humanitas is but one manifestation of a
larger wave of self-awareness that Toronto has been
experiencing for the last five years. City building
only happens when cities are seized with a sense of
their own possibilities. Paradoxically, those
possibilities sometimes become crystal clear when
we are plainly not measuring up to our potential.
The complex truth of achievement is that it often
begins in failure. During the 1990s, Toronto,
having been dubbed ‘the city that works’ or ‘New
York run by the Swiss’, had entered a period of
turbulence, characterized by a radical changing of
its governance structures that severely challenged
Toronto’s fiscal and cultural standing. Toronto
experienced a difficult, some would say lost,
decade – a long hard winter of discontent.
Discontent it turns out is a cornerstone of city
building. Discontent galvanized disparate groups
from the public and the private sector to seize their
own initiative and start setting imaginative, but
feasible goals to revive our city. Initially, I think we
all felt very alone and faced with a gargantuan task.
Then with astonishment we discovered that we were
a bona fide movement! It was like digging a hole to
China and then suddenly hearing someone else
digging from the other side! Happily we now find
ourselves in the midst of an unprecedented cultural
building boom in that is a virtual civic renaissance.
For a visitor, and we are expecting many,
it starts right at the dazzling new Pearson
International Airport with its many works of art.
Then there is our much-loved Ontario College of
Art and Design, the new Opera and Ballet House,
Humanitas in Toronto: a project story
Rita Davies
the National Ballet School, the expanded Art
Gallery of Ontario, the Gardiner Museum of
Ceramic Art, the Royal Ontario Museum and the
Royal Conservatory of Music. In the Historic
Distillery District, the Young Centre for the
Performing Arts opened recently as home to
Soulpepper Theatre as well as a theatre training
facility for George Brown College. Plans are well
underway for the Toronto International Film
Festival’s new headquarters, Festival Hall, which
will open in 2009. This exuberant outpouring
of city building will be joined in 2015 with
Humanitas.
One of the central roles performed by the
culture programme of the City of Toronto is to help
create an overall strategy for the kind of city we
are trying to build. Thus, we are aiming to make
Toronto an international culture capital whose
essence will be creativity, whether it be in the arts,
high-tech industry or in medical research. Our
Culture Plan for the Creative City plays a
pivotal role in this process. One of its key
recommendations was to embark on a feasibility
study to develop an innovative new public
attraction on Toronto’s waterfront. Humanitas
would thus provide an anchor for the massive
regeneration of our waterfront, helping both to
spur and to characterize that development. The
‘Toronto Model’ – a complex mix of the cultures of
the world, contained in a framework of tolerance,
order and hard work, is an exceptional civic
experiment – that really works! We felt that
perhaps it was time we shared the outstanding
results of our experiment with the rest of the world.
We are a global gateway and the gate swings both
ways. Even more importantly, we Torontonians
need to fully understand the scope of this Toronto
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MUSEUM OF THE CITY VERSUS MUSEUM REPRESENTING THE CITY
experiment ourselves. We need a forum to study
and explain it, to criticize and celebrate it, while
branding it for export. This forum would be a
gateway to a city that would function as a dynamic
‘search engine’, orienting our citizens and visitors
to the broad themes and plot points that make up
the story of Toronto’s evolution. It would then
connect them with the many museums, sites, events
and neighbourhoods to explore in-depth. It would
serve as a spotlight, illuminating and celebrating
the many facets of the jewel that is our city.
Earlier, when I said that we were astonished
to discover that we were part of a movement in re-
shaping Toronto, we were equally startled to realize
that we were part of an international zeitgeist. Cities
everywhere were discovering that in a post-
industrial economy, creativity and culture hone the
sharp edge of competitive advantage. Exploring
those natural linkages, Humanitas will also be a city
museum about cities. Cities everywhere are
struggling with the creation of a common purpose
when traditional bonds of culture, language and
religion are no longer primary connections.
Humanitas will be an energetic, kinetic hub of ideas
and passionate debate about how, not just to build
cities, but how to develop citizens. One of our most
developed citizens said, ‘Cities are problems in
organized complexity’. Humanitas will embrace
that complexity. Speaking of zeitgeist, Boston is
working on a very similar project to Humanitas –
the Boston Museum. It is a marvellous coincidence
that a city once defined by its Irish Catholic heritage
is going through a civic redefinition, just as
Toronto, once known for its Irish Protestant
character – it used to be called the Belfast of North
America – is doing the same. I suppose that great
cities think alike.
62 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Toronto’s Poet
Laureate, has decreed that ‘the city must fall in love
with itself ’ and Toronto is doing just that, during
the eighteen-month ‘To Live with Culture’ creativity
campaign we are now in the midst of celebrating.
‘To Live with Culture’ is an extended coming-out
party for all our new cultural jewel boxes, but also
specifically for Humanitas, which launched at
the end of May the ‘Humanitas Waterfront Festival
of Creativity’. This included conferences,
exhibitions, events, performances and debates that
illustrated and animated how Toronto’s creative
energy is deeply rooted in its history and diversity.
Our ‘Cooler by the Lake Tent’ was set up on
Toronto’s historic front porch, the waterfront,
staking a claim to curating our future.1
So at heart, Humanitas will be city building
through the development of a collective narrative
that embraces the contradictions of our history and
gives us glimpses of our potential future. Robert
Fulford, a Toronto writer, once said, ‘We construct
cities in two ways: with concrete and with
imagination. Cities live and die by their mythology
. . . going mythological is to a city what going
platinum is to a record: suddenly, everything
connected with it becomes desirable’. And myths
are so powerful because they are both simple to
grasp initially and wonderfully complex when you
begin to peel back the layers of meaning. And we
like it complex.
NOTES
1. For other events see http://www.livewithculture.ca
 ª Marina TAURUS

10

10. Art expressions in the city. Rue des Coutures St-Gervais, Paris, Le Marais.

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 City Museum, Society and Conflict:
the Belfast experience
by Mike Houlihan

Mike Houlihan started his museum career as a research assistant in the Department of
Exhibits at the Imperial War Museum, London, becoming keeper of the Department of
Permanent Exhibitions and head of Exhibitions Research. In 2003, he became director general
of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, a family of seven museums illustrating the
history, industries and natural environment of Wales, as well as important international
collections of art.

For the museum in a divided society, the

vocabulary is different. Where others celebrate
diversity, it works with division. There is no
objective history; passion is everything.
Conventional, institutional behaviours such as
scholarship or ‘being the best’ shrink beside more
fundamental guiding values centred on truth, trust
and humanity.

The Ulster Museum and its content

The population of Belfast is not huge, 275,000 in

the city itself; 580,000 in Greater Belfast or 30 per
cent of the total population of Northern Ireland.
Many of these people live in communities
ghettoized by religion and politics, distrustful of
the ‘other’. These ghettos are expressions of
conflict, memory and identity. The tribal painting
of kerbstones and buildings, paramilitary
designations, or the flying of the Union Jack or the
Irish tricolour, mark the external boundaries;
within, interpretations of history and memory
through wall paintings, theatre and acts of
commemoration, powerfully reinforce prejudices
and justify the struggle.

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 City Museum, Society and Conflict: the Belfast experience
Mike Houlihan

ª National Museums Northern Ireland

11

11. Young visitors to the exhibition Conflict that brought together a range of collections to illustrate the impact of war and conflict upon Irish
society from earliest times. Ken Howard’s Ulster Crucifixion, (1978) provides an artist’s voice and backdrop to the contemporary section of the
exhibition.

For thirty years of armed conflict in Belfast,
civil life functioned after a fashion. It was not
Beirut, Sarajevo or even Baghdad in terms of the
devastation and disruption. However, the daily diet
of bombings, assassinations, knee-cappings,
security lockdowns and political paralysis
traumatized a society. The Ulster Museum was a
microcosm of this world. Its staff had lived
through the troubles and reflected the divisions
within the city. Some had been interned, others
bombed or shot because of their religion or
politics.
The museum sits at the centre of the city,
surrounded by the streets and ghettos of a living
history. It suffered numerous scares but was never
directly attacked. However, the off-site textile
store and its collection were destroyed in 1972,
following a bomb attack on an adjoining building.
Originally a municipal museum, the Belfast Museum
and Art Gallery was built to house the collections of
two Belfast-based learned societies. It became the
Ulster Museum in 1962, and began to receive
funding from the central government, rather than
the city. This reflected the fact that it had always

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TAKING A STANCE

ª National Museums Northern Ireland

ª National Museums Northern Ireland

12 13
12. For the Irish Icons exhibition two mural painters, a Loyalist and a
13. A Loyalist mural in the Icons exhibition depicts the first day of the
Republican, which appear in the backdrop, were commissioned to
Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, when the Ulster Division attacked
portray respective interpretation of the warrior hero Cúchulainn. The
the German trenches at Thiepval.
mythical hero of Ulster whose bronze sculpture stands in front of the
murals, is an icon shared by both communities in Northern Ireland.
satellite displays and, at a time when celebrations
of the rebellion across Ireland were being criticized
collected material from both Belfast and the nine for recycling historical memory as a tourist
counties which make up the old province of Ulster. attraction, the museum was building a reputation
for, and confidence in, tackling sensitive issues.
The museum’s social history galleries had Two years later, The Act of Union exhibition was
been redisplayed in 1975, telling a chronological mounted, under political pressure, to mark the
narrative from prehistory to 1920, with a bicentenary of the legislation which brought
somewhat self-conscious and brief account of the Ireland into the British Union.
establishment of Northern Ireland. From the late
1980s, the museum began to address some of With the peace process bedding in, the
the commemorative pegs of Irish history through a museum decided to move away from the anniversary
series of anniversary exhibitions. The first, Kings in blockbuster towards a thematic approach, exploring
Conflict, in 1990, marked the tercentenary of the more fundamental issues of memory. In 2000, it
Battle of the Boyne; it was criticized by nationalists mounted Icons of Identity looking at Irish icons
and republicans. To redress this criticism, in 1998, across 2,000 years of history. The icons included the
Up in Arms examined the uprising of the United Virgin Mary, King William of Orange, the Battle of
Irishmen in 1798; this was criticized by Unionists. the Somme and Michael Collins. In parallel, the
However, all sides welcomed the outreach museum also generated War and Conflict, a
component consisting of workshops, lectures and travelling exhibition. Both included community-

66 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 City Museum, Society and Conflict: the Belfast experience
curated components which piloted the approach for
a major exhibition, Conflict: the Irish at War, which
opened in 2003 and ran until August 2006.
The role of the museum
In developing public programming, there was a
place for three human voices: the victim; the owner
and the cultural negotiator. The story of the war in
Northern Ireland is the story of its victims.
Between 1968 and today, there have been over
3,600 deaths and over 30,000 people wounded or
injured as a result of the conflict. In the majority
of these killings, no one was convicted. It has been
a huge price to pay for the inability of the people
of Northern Ireland to resolve their differences
peacefully. It was one of the contradictions of the
conflict that increasing violence frequently led to
attempts to seek a political settlement. However,
the increasing number of victims in each
community tended to reduce the likelihood of
peace by reinforcing the Republican or Loyalist
stake in ultimate victory. Either way, compared
with politicians and others, the victim has
frequently been left without a voice.
Many museums in the United Kingdom are
legally designated as charitable institutions, with
their collections held in trust on behalf of the public
who are the legal owners. Terms such as ‘customer’
or ‘audience’ are no longer appropriate, as they
suggest ownership, and authority resides with the
manager or curator; in fact, the hierarchy of
ownership, though not always recognized on either
side, is the reverse. Increasingly, the city museum in
the twenty-first century is being defined by a
struggle over ownership of purpose and governance,
ownership of the collections and their
Mike Houlihan
interpretation, and ownership of the use of the social
space. This shift towards the audience is expressed
in the way institutions have been obliged to address
the redefinition of the museum, by their users, as
community property and a site for contemporary
cultural development, dialogue and representation.
Initially, the Ulster Museum lacked the
expertise and links to make the connections to the
voices that it wanted to represent, especially those
of the victim. So, for Conflict: the Irish at War a
steering group was established of individuals who
could build these links, advise and criticize, and
the museum became a cultural negotiator. The
steering group was chaired by Sir Ken Bloomfield,
a trustee of the Museum and chairman of the
Victims Commission; a retired chief executive of
the Belfast City Council; a former BBC journalist,
to advise on media sensitivities; the director of
WAVE, a victims and counselling centre in north
Belfast; and a trauma counsellor.
The community groups who had input in
terms of bringing forward the voices featured in
the exhibition included the Indian Community
Centre; through WAVE, the voices of three women
bereaved in the troubles; COISTE, a Republican
ex-prisoners group, including the voice of a former
hunger striker; Windsor Women’s Centre; Power to
the People, a Loyalist ex-prisoners’ training project;
an interdenominational clergy group; and school
children.
Theatre of Memory
The Museum’s work on another exhibition, Icons of
Identity, demonstrated how museums are often
perceived by communities as appropriate places of
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 67
TAKING A STANCE
commemoration in the weave of remembrance.
It is important for museums not to get too
sentimental about community memory. A sense of
the past conveyed through folk memory is not
easily disproved by the rational and, therefore, can
undermine the dispassionate historical process.
History is frequently the incomplete reconstruction
of what no longer exists; but, memory is organic
and alive within the minds of living societies and,
therefore, in permanent evolution and dynamic
change. This is especially true of Ireland where
community interpretations of the past sit at the
heart of national conflict. The events of the past are
relived as contemporary events and give meaning
and purpose to the present. Hence the number
of Provisional IRA bombings on significant
anniversary dates and attacks on places of
remembrance.
For communities, as for individuals, there
can be no sense of identity without remembering.
However, the selection of what is remembered will
be determined by the group to which we belong;
which in turn sets boundaries to the perceptions and
hopes of the rising generation. Certainly,
remembrance days, the creation of memorials and
the wearing of signs of remembrance all tend to
fabricate a common narrative of the past. The
problem with narrative memory is that it plays tricks
and can be selective. However, all of this is great
news for museums. Whilst historians are sometimes
disinterested in the ritual and expressions of how
societies remember, this is the slightly dangerous
point at which museums connect to the world.
Museums are places stuffed with
memories. They reunite objects with stories,
ostensibly with the curatorial intention of telling
68 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
‘objective’ history. However, these objects and their
associated memories are highly volatile especially
when the public see them as a vehicle for
promoting community memory. The public
recognize the power and status of our spaces.
Serious proposals have been brought forward in
Northern Ireland by Sinn Féin for the conversion
of the former Maze prison into a museum of the
troubles. However, this would clearly serve only to
iterate one narrative, given the power of the place
and its associations. The other iteration is to pull
it down and create a conference centre.
For historians, martyrdom is a
contradictory concept because it has the baffling
power to transform failure and death into triumph.
However, it is impossible to deny the power of
martyrdom, sacrifice and the gun as determinants
of modern Irish history. The blood of those who
have fallen for both causes has repeatedly been
invoked to inspire and stiffen the resolve of those
left behind. These heroic and tragic stories are
perpetuated and abstracted into simpler graphic
forms such as banners, gable-end wall paintings
and paramilitary displays. For example, the Icons
exhibition explored the role that remembering the
losses suffered by the Ulster battalions on the
first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916)
plays in the Loyalist psyche. This single event, in a
single place on a single day of a much bigger and
longer battle, has come to represent, in the minds
of succeeding generations of Loyalists and
Unionists, the unstinting sacrifice of Ulstermen
in defence of Great Britain. The past has been
recovered into the present in the form of a blood
contract under which any compromise, today, on
the union with Britain would be a betrayal of those
who fell ninety years ago.
 City Museum, Society and Conflict: the Belfast experience
Bridges across the divide
An imagined community will subordinate
individual memory to the broader framework of
social memory. In this context, events,
personalities and social characteristics will be
absorbed and given significance. Even museum
collections can promote a sectarian rationale with,
for example, industry perceived as an expression of
the Protestant work ethic. Social subjectivity is
then important because the permanence and
continuing evolution of myths, memories, symbols
and common modes of expression within an ethnic
culture are the hallmarks of its uniqueness and a
way for it to make sense of the world.
In exploring the nature of uniqueness, the
Ulster Museum set out to build separate bridges
into each community using the cultural negotiators
to establish linkages through programming
activities. These included reminiscences with the
Loyalist Shankhill Road Women’s Group; cross-
community initiatives on the ritual trappings of
commemoration such as banners; public talks on
the significance to both communities of the First
World War and a range of workshops at urban
interfaces.
Today, it is commonplace for museums to
engage with their communities. In the context of a
divided society, building such relationships creates
added responsibilities because of the trauma of
past and ongoing injury. It requires a conscious
recognition that the museum is in for the long haul
both in building relationships and then in
sustaining them into the future. Trauma is more
than just the memory and experience of pain. It is a
deep and recurring sense of hurt and wounding
Mike Houlihan
that revives and relives the original experience. In
the same way, commemorating the past can also
feed and renew old bitterness. In current
exhibition, Conflict: the Irish at War sought to
recognize that loss and bereavement is nobody’s
monopoly; and that recognizing each other’s past
sufferings might make some understanding
between enemies possible.
The creation of social capital between an
institution and its users/owners is one of the
most significant challenges facing the museum. This
can be achieved by telling our stories, and
by allowing others to tell theirs, in ways that reflect a
broader political, cultural and social reality. In such
places, there should be opportunities for dialogue
between people and communities, as collections
provide a gateway to understanding how other
people live and uniquely view their world. The
gallery spaces of the National Museums in Northern
Ireland are considered by both communities to be
neutral, non-threatening spaces where cultural
debate and even dialogue can be generated; a rare
commodity and an inspiring opportunity amidst the
‘no-go’ areas of a divided society.
Commentators define a plural society as
open, where individuals are able to benefit from
the full social, economic and educational
advantages of society, and yet continue to maintain
their unique ethnic and cultural allegiances. These
principles sit well with the notion that underpins
many museums, namely that their improving
influence ought to reach all sections of the
population. In this context, the vibrancy of many
of today’s museums, perhaps, owes a great deal to
the reinvigoration of the museum’s originating link
with public learning. This is clearly a powerful,
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 69
TAKING A STANCE
developmental theme within today’s museums, a
significant driver of any external social change and
an underpinning element of the Ulster Museum’s
community work.
Cargoes of truths
In a user survey conducted in 2001, the public
unequivocally told the museum that it wanted to
see the story of the troubles represented in its
galleries. This was a difficult message given the
still, livid trauma of the last thirty years and the
inevitable controversy that would follow any
attempt to present an objective narrative. So,
careful thought was given as to how the museum
could begin, without compromising its standing in
both communities, to prise apart and explore
issues of identity, conflict and remembrance so as
to build a platform for future development.
Conflict: the Irish at War did not attempt to
tell the story of the troubles. Instead, it focussed on
the wounds and legacy of war across 10,000 years
of Irish history, from the Bronze Age to the
twentieth century, drawing on archaeological,
social history and art collections. Central to the
narrative presentation were words and voices
expressing the personal perspectives of victims of
the more recent troubles through their recorded
and written commentaries on the objects presented.
The final section of the exhibition dealt
with the aftermath of war by exploring issues of
remembrance and closure, including medical care
for survivors. There was also a resource and
contemplation area with comment cards. Seventy
voices were recorded for the project, of which
sixty-one were used. Care was taken to balance
70 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
age, religious denomination and experience of
conflict. Under the guidance of the cultural
negotiators, the project team worked to a set
protocol for the inclusion of the voices, given the
subjectivity of their content. For various reasons,
such as the lack of established relationships, some
categories of victims, for example soldiers’ families,
could not be represented. What did the voices add?
First, the voices provided a core narrative and
interpretative route into the objects and themes.
They were not an audio backdrop and, therefore,
audio equipment was freely available to all visitors.
Secondly, the immediacy of their experiences and
the commonality of human emotion gave empathy
across time and division. Thirdly, there was the
power and uniqueness of the insider’s perspective
and, unusually, the victim commenting on the
aggressor. Finally, most touchingly, was their
ordinariness.
The process and methodology of
incorporating the subjective posed a serious
intellectual and working challenge to the
museum’s curators. Fundamentally, it was a
question of skills and confidence. However, this
has to be viewed against a background, in the
United Kingdom, of twenty years of decline in the
basic curatorial techniques of developing and
growing social history collections and presenting
challenging ideas.
Work at the Ulster Museum demonstrated
that as museums enter a period of profound change
during which their purpose, direction and
objectivity will be challenged in unprecedented
ways, they should ensure that the curator is the
innovator driving a more socially transforming and
interactive role.
Place-based Education in an
Urban Environment1
by Maggie Russell-Ciardi

Maggie Russell-Ciardi obtained her M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University
and her B.A. in labour studies and Spanish from Oberlin College. She is the education
director at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Before joining the Tenement Museum staff,
she managed a grant programme for organizations seeking to strengthen inter-group
relations in communities with new immigrant residents. She has also served as the
advocacy director at the Center for Immigrant Rights and has worked as an organizer of
migrant farm workers.

What is place-based education?

Place-based education can be defined as any

educational approach that uses the local
environment as the context for teaching and
learning. The primary goal of place-based
education is to inspire students to take an interest
in their local community and to galvanize students
to take action to build a better future for that
community.

Generally, in the United States, when most

people think about place-based education, the
place that they have in mind is a rural, not an
urban one. This is because most of the place-based
education programmes developed to date have
been in rural settings. As David Gruenwald writes
in his article ‘The Beast of Both Worlds: A Critical
Pedagogy of Place’: ‘In recent literature, educators
claiming place as a guiding construct associate
a place-based approach with outdoor,
environmental, and rural education. Place-based
education is frequently discussed at a distance
from the urban, multi-cultural arena.’ However,
place-based education does not need to be limited

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TAKING A STANCE
to rural settings. Educational institutions in urban
settings can use place-based education to interest
people in the issues that shape urban life and to
spark civic engagement with urban issues.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in
New York City is one urban institution that has
been able to develop place-based education
programming that effectively engages people from
diverse backgrounds in dialogue about
contemporary urban problems. Place-based
education has been an effective tool for the
Tenement Museum to promote civic engagement
with urban issues, because it provides an entry
point for exploring shared experience, for
creating a narrative about the meaning of
community, and for connecting people with the
issues that shape the communities to which they
belong.
A belief in the power of place is at the heart
of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. This
belief informs its mission, all of the education
programmes the Museum offers, and its
relationship to the community in which it is
located, the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The Lower East Side is one of the most
famous immigrant neighbourhoods in the United
States. Historically, it was home to European
immigrants. Today, the neighbourhood is home
to immigrants from China and the Dominican
Republic, among other countries, as well as
migrants from Puerto Rico. Approximately 60 per
cent of Lower East Side residents speak a language
other than English at home. The languages spoken
include four mutually unintelligible Chinese
dialects.
72 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
The Lower East Side is also predominantly
a working-class neighbourhood. Historically,
new immigrants were drawn to the Lower East Side
because of the availability of tenement housing,
which was among the most affordable housing
options in the city. Today, the affordable housing
continues to attract people to the neighbourhood.
The median annual household income in the
section of the Lower East Side where the museum
is located is approximately $25,000. More than a
quarter of the people live below the poverty line,
but only about half of them receive any kind of
public assistance.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
was founded in 1988 with a mission to promote
tolerance and historical perspective through
the presentation and interpretation of the variety
of immigrant and migrant experiences in
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gateway to
America. This mission statement grounds the
museum in its local community and obliges
the museum to interpret the stories of that
community. More than this, it reflects a belief that
by telling the community’s stories, the museum
can accomplish a social mission of promoting
tolerance.
The museum also believes that the
importance of the story of the Lower East Side
reaches far beyond the geographical borders of the
neighbourhood. Increasingly, other countries
worldwide are witnessing unprecedented numbers
of immigrants in their cities and are grappling with
how to respond, and so the story of the Lower East
Side, which was one of the first neighbourhoods
to witness a massive influx of immigrants, has
international significance.

The museum and immigrant experiences
The museum’s founders wanted to tell the story of
the immigrants who had arrived in New York City
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And they wanted to present and to interpret this
story in such a way that visitors would make
connections between the experiences of those
immigrants and the experiences of immigrants who
arrived in the United States only very recently. The
reason they believed that this was important was
that in the United States there is a great deal of
nostalgia for previous generations of immigrants
and, among many communities, a great deal of
hostility towards recent immigrants. The museum
hoped to challenge the assumption that there is
something significantly different about today’s
immigrants by calling attention to the many
similarities between immigrant experiences past
and present, and by introducing Americans to
the many things their immigrant parents or
grandparents had in common – before they became
‘Americans’ – with the newest immigrants who are
struggling to get by and to adjust to life in the
United States today.
The museum wanted visitors to examine
critically their views on contemporary immigration
and to engage in dialogue about the central
questions surrounding American immigration
policy, such as, who should be able to enter the
United States, who should be granted citizenship,
and what resources should be made available to
newcomers.
The challenge, though, was that there was
not one single immigrant experience, but that
there were as many immigrant stories as there were
Place-based Education in an Urban Environment
Maggie Russell-Ciardi
immigrants. And these immigrants came from
different countries, different backgrounds,
different social classes and different experiences.
How could we create a narrative that did not
simplify these diverse experiences, but that
managed to explore what was essential,
universal and enduring about the immigrant
experience?
The founders of the museum agreed that
no matter what the background and experience of
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants
who came to the United States, most of these
immigrants did have one thing in common: the
place where they lived. Almost every immigrant
who entered New York City between 1830 and
1930 lived at one time or another in a tenement
building in the Manhattan neighbourhood known
as the Lower East Side. The power of place,
though, even goes beyond connecting people
across national origin, language and religion. Place
also connects people across time. Living in a
tenement building in the Lower East Side is an
experience that unites generations of immigrants,
whether they came from Russia in 1905 or from
Hong Kong in 2005.
So the museum decided to take as its
starting point for exploring immigrant experiences
one very specific place, a tenement building,
located at No. 97 Orchard Street in the heart of the
Lower East Side. 97 Orchard Street is a five storey
multiple-family residence that was constructed in
1863 and was home to an estimated 7,000 people
between 1864 and 1935, when it was closed as a
residence. The building remained unoccupied until
1988, when it was acquired by the Tenement
Museum.
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TAKING A STANCE
Place-based education programmes at the
Tenement Museum
To date, the museum has identified approximately
1,700 of the former residents of the building and
re-created the apartments of five families who
actually lived in the building. The museum offers
guided tours of the re-created apartments and
educators tell visitors the family stories. The tours
are organized thematically; the theme of each of
the tours is an enduring social issue that has
impacted upon the lives of immigrant families in
the past and continues to be relevant today.
The theme of one tour is immigrants in the
garment industry. The tour starts with two family
stories and uses them to provide historical
perspectives on the problem of sweatshops in the
garment industry. The tour visits the apartments of
two families who made clothes for a living at two
different time periods, the Levine family in the
1890s, when the garment industry was just
beginning to develop, and most garment
production was done inside tenement apartments,
and the Rogarshevsky family in the early 1900s,
during the factory era, when garment workers were
beginning to organize to address the problem of
sweatshops. The tour explores the evolution of the
garment industry in New York City through the
eyes of these two families and compares their
experiences to the experiences of immigrants
working in the garment industry today.
This theme was selected because the Lower
East Side was the birthplace of the modern garment
industry (in 1900 there were over twenty garment
shops on the block where the neighbourhood is
located) and because there are still a significant
74 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
number of garment shops in the Lower East Side
today, many of which are considered to be
sweatshops by the Department of Labor.
The museum complicates the history it
presents by not limiting its interpretation to one
perspective on the issue, but by incorporating
the diverse perspectives of a wide range of
stakeholders with very different relationships to
the issue being explored, and by exploring how
these perspectives have changed over time. The
tour about the garment industry examines the
perspective of the garment manufacturer, the small
business owner, the workers, consumers and
reformers. The tour starts with an audio recording
of these stakeholders sharing their views about the
state of the garment industry in New York City,
and then the educator takes visitors back in time
to the year 1897 and examines the views that
these stakeholders held about the industry at that
time.
The museum involves visitors in the
interpretation by asking them a series of open-
ended questions throughout the tour on their own
knowledge, beliefs and opinions about the issues
raised. For instance, on the tour about the garment
industry, educators ask visitors questions such as,
‘Do you think the conditions for immigrant
garment workers were better 100 years ago or
today?’ And ‘Do you think it is acceptable for the
garment factory owners to pay below the minimum
wage if they can find workers who will work for
those wages?’ Visitors then engage in dialogue
with the educator and with each other, sharing
perspectives, discussing personal experiences, and
exploring the reasons they feel the way they do
about these issues.

Another tour called ‘Getting By:
Immigrants Weathering Hard Times’, visits the
apartments of two families who lived during
economic depressions, the Gumpertz family in
1873 and the Baldizzi family in 1935. The tour
explores the evolution of public opinion about
what assistance immigrants in need should be
entitled to and who should be responsible for
providing it. On this tour, visitors discuss whether
immigration status should be a factor in
determining eligibility for government benefits, as
well as what role they themselves can play in
helping immigrants in their own community who
are in need.
A third tour visits the re-created apartment
of the Confino family in 1916. Visitors take on the
role of a recently arrived immigrant family and
interact with a costumed interpreter playing the
role of 14-year-old Victoria Confino who was a
Sephardic Jew in a neighbourhood that was
predominantly Ashkenazi. They learn about her
efforts to adjust to life in the Lower East Side, and
her experience forging a new Sephardic-American
identity. They then discuss issues of cultural
identity and debate what it means to be American,
and whether it is better to retain one’s own cultural
heritage or to become ‘American’.
When school groups participate in the
Confino programme, they also engage in a
corresponding activity in which they are asked to
consider their own views about what American
culture is and who should be able to become
American. They are asked to work in small groups
to create a definition of ‘American’ that is inclusive
rather than exclusive, and that takes into
consideration the fact that the country is made up
Place-based Education in an Urban Environment
Maggie Russell-Ciardi
of peoples from diverse races, cultures and
religious backgrounds.
After selected tours, visitors return to a
‘kitchen space’ and take part in a dialogue called
‘Kitchen Conversations’, led by a trained facilitator,
about contemporary issues that the tour raised for
them. In recent dialogues, visitors have discussed
issues ranging from immigration enforcement to
how to ensure fair working conditions for
immigrant workers, to bilingual education, to
whether immigrants should assimilate themselves
into American society or retain their own cultural
heritage. The facilitator’s role is to help visitors
make the connection between immigrant
experiences past and present, to challenge the
assumptions that visitors may have about
contemporary immigrants, and to inspire visitors
to take action to shape the issues raised by the
historical site in a variety of ways.
The museum also offers neighbourhood
walking tours that visit sites that are not featured
on traditional walking tours, but that shed new
light on the issues that have shaped – and continue
to shape – the neighbourhood, and which raise
important questions about contemporary urban
issues. One tour stop is an Asian Studies high
school where students are educated in English and
Chinese. At this stop, educators engage visitors in
debates about bilingual education. Another tour
stop is a synagogue. Here educators tell visitors
about how, when the rabbi died in 1905, the
funeral procession was harassed by Irish workers
who were angry about the arrival of Eastern
European immigrants in the Lower East Side
because they considered it to be their own
exclusive neighbourhood. This leads to discussions
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 75
TAKING A STANCE
about the inter-group tensions that arise when the
demographics of neighbourhoods change and
about strategies that have been developed in
visitors’ communities for improving inter-group
understanding and collaboration.
The goals of these place-based education
programmes are:
• to help visitors explore their own personal
connection to the social, economic and
political issues which impact the lives of
immigrants and migrants;
• to highlight the important role immigrants
and migrants have played – and continue to
play – in shaping our society, exploring
specific examples of how they, both
individually and collectively, have
transformed the communities in which they
live and our nation as a whole;
• to promote meaningful dialogue about and
critical engagement with the enduring
issues that have impacted upon the lives of
immigrant and migrant communities, and
to provide a forum for visitors to consider
the role they can play in shaping those
issues today;
• to help people from diverse backgrounds
make connections with and learn from one
another.
There are five guiding principles that have
been essential to the success of the museum’s
place-based education programmes. Other
museums interested in using place-based
education to promote civic engagement with urban
issues may want to consider adopting them at their
own institutions.
76 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
The first principle is to present and
interpret the history of sites whose importance is
not widely recognized or acknowledged, but that
provide a new perspective on history. Before the
Tenement Museum was established, 97 Orchard
Street was probably considered to be an
unremarkable building, and the stories of its
residents unimportant. But the founders were
convinced that because the building’s stories
represented a part of history that was
unrepresented in traditional historiography – the
history of poor and working-class people – it
would provide an important new perspective on
history. The importance of the building has since
come to be recognized, and 97 Orchard Street was
the first tenement building to be designated a
National Historic Site.
The second principle is to explore ways
in which the sites are connected to larger social
issues that are not just relevant in the local
community where the museum is located, but in
other communities as well. The Tenement
Museum does not just tell the story of its building
and its residents, but connects those stories to
larger issues – such as fair working conditions and
access to public benefits – making the stories
relevant for all visitors, regardless of their
backgrounds or where they come from. Visitors
have been very responsive to this interpretation
and have often made connections on tours between
what they are learning about 97 Orchard Street and
similar issues that are playing out in their own
communities.
The third principle is to complicate
history, that is, to tell the history of the sites that
the institution interprets from a variety of different

perspectives, with a particular emphasis on
perspectives that have been under-represented in
traditional historiography. The Tenement Museum
does not just tell the story from one point of view,
but relates a complicated and nuanced history
from the perspective of a variety of stakeholders.
The museum has found that an approach
presenting issues in a way that is not overly
simplistic, but is transparent about the fact that
they were contentious issues in their day, sheds
light on why similar issues today may still be
contentious and makes visitors more engaged in
exploring the complexities of those issues.
The fourth principle is to involve visitors
in the interpretation. The museum should provide
visitors with a forum in which to play a role in the
interpretation of the sites by sharing their
perspectives on their history as well as on the
contemporary relevance of the larger social issues
they represent. The Tenement Museum does not
present itself as the sole authority on the issues it
addresses, but, in keeping with its polyphonic
representation of historical issues, it is transparent
about the fact that there are multiple perspectives
on contemporary issues, and that visitors have
their own knowledge, beliefs and opinions about
those issues. Treating visitors as partners in
exploring why history is relevant and in making
sense of contemporary issues encourages them to
become engaged with the issues and empowers
them to take ownership of those issues.
The fifth and last principle is to inspire
visitors to take action. This means to encourage
them to shape the social issues impacting upon
their communities and to provide them with
examples of ways they can bring about positive
Place-based Education in an Urban Environment
Maggie Russell-Ciardi
change. The Tenement Museum is committed to
providing a forum for visitors to think about, once
they have begun to examine critically complicated
social issues, what they can do in their own lives to
shape the issues in positive ways. This is an
essential component of promoting engagement
with those issues, because it leaves visitors with a
sense that they can and should take action to
improve the lives of their communities.
Museums in urban areas should consider
claiming place-based education as a guiding
construct. They should consider exploring
possibilities for interpreting the history of sites in
communities whose importance is not widely
recognized, but that represent a story that has not
been told and that sheds new light on enduring
social issues. Any museum located in urban areas
can look to their local communities for sites
around which they can develop effective place-
based education programmes using the five
principles outlined above. This approach will
certainly spark dialogue about pressing urban
issues and will promote civic engagement with
those issues.
NOTE
1. Sections of this article were published in the article ‘Learning in Your
Own Backyard: place-based education for museums’, which appeared in
the Fall 2005 issue of Exhibitionist.
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 77
 Barriers and Drivers: building
audience at the Immigration
Museum, Melbourne, Australia
by Barbara Horn

Barbara Horn has been the director of operations at Museum Victoria since February 2005.
A member of the executive management team of Museum Victoria, she is responsible for
implementation of Museum Victoria’s Strategic Plan through the provision of daily access
for various audiences to a range of innovative, high quality experiences and programmes at
Melbourne Museum, Science works, the Immigration Museum, IMAX Melbourne, and the
Royal Exhibition Building, as well as through the Discovery Programme across Victoria.

To begin this account of the journey undertaken

by Melbourne’s Immigration Museum as it has
developed its products and position in the leisure
marketplace, let me locate the Australian
experience and stories of immigration and give
you a sense of its significance to the culturally
diverse and multicultural society which is
Melbourne, capital of the State of Victoria,
Australia.

Immigration: a potent Australian story

There are a number of reasons why immigration is

a potent story for Australians. Australia is a young
country, a country peopled by immigrants since
the first Europeans settled in the Colony of New
South Wales in 1788. This is not to discount the
significance of the stories of dispossession, cultural
dilution, destruction and survival of Indigenous
Australians, who have occupied Australia for at
least 40,000 years – these stories are moving,
powerful and of great importance, but are for
another time and place.

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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 Barriers and Drivers: building audience at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia
Australia has been an attractive destination
for numerous ‘waves’ of immigration over the last
220 years. Settlers have come in search of
economic security, social harmony and/or political
refuge – these drivers motivated waves of settlers
from the hundreds of thousands who came in
search of gold in the 1800s to those who sought
refuge from the war in Europe in the middle of the
twentieth century, and conflict in the Middle East
and Africa at the end of the last century and the
early years of this one.
Ever since seekers after gold thronged to
Australia, coming from every continent,
governments have sought to control entry into
Australia. In 1855, the Colony of Victoria passed
Australia’s first immigration act – the Act to
Regulate the Residence of the Chinese
Population in Victoria; one of the first laws passed
by the newly federated Australian Government in
1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act
(commonly known as the White Australia Policy).
Race is no longer a criterion for screening
prospective settlers; however, entry is strictly
controlled and its terms often the subject of public
debate.
Australia’s population is now approaching
21 million, of whom 5 million live in Victoria
and about 3.6 million in the conurbation that is
Melbourne. Some 20 per cent of Victorian
residents were born in countries in which
English is not the main language, although the
majority of immigrants arrive from English-
speaking countries. Victoria encompasses people
who have come from 140 nations and are of
diverse beliefs, skin colour, histories and social
structures.
Barbara Horn
So here we have a potent story –
widespread and part of the experience of each
generation since European settlement, politically
sensitive, often ambivalent and a central part of the
Australian identity and memory, collective and
individual.
Melbourne’s Immigration Museum
The Immigration Museum’s mission is ‘to record
and interpret the immigration experience of people
to Victoria and Australia, and to promote and
celebrate our cultural diversity and resulting
Australian identity’. The Immigration Museum
aims to take visitors on a journey to discover the
many dimensions of the migration experience from
the 1800s through to the present day. The
museum, which opened in 1998 in the Old
Customs House on the Yarra River, is unique to
Victoria in both its subject-matter and through the
emotional, personal responses it evokes from
visitors. Visitors are offered an opportunity to gain
an understanding of their own traditions as well as
Australia’s rich and diverse cultural heritage. The
Immigration Museum is strongly engaged with
Victoria’s culturally and linguistically diverse
population and approaches content,
interpretation and development in a range of ways.
These include community exhibitions and
festivals, programmes and activities for families
and schools, events such as ship reunions, the
sharing and documenting of stories and forums for
exploration of the issues of a multicultural society.
As for museums and other cultural
agencies operating in relatively small populations,
being well-known to and well-loved by one’s local
audience is a critical success factor. The use of
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 79
TAKING A STANCE

sophisticated and frequent research as the

foundation for marketing and for product
development responds to this need.

Audience research and gallery development –

‘Getting In’

In 2000, two years after its opening, a summative

evaluation of the Immigration Museum was
conducted to ensure that visitor satisfaction was
maintained or increased. Using a focus group
methodology it was established that one gallery

ª Image courtesy of Museum Victoria

was not contributing to visitor satisfaction. The
exhibition left no impact, those visitors who
could recall it did not understand the overall
concept. A decision was made to redevelop this
gallery. Prior to commencement of the
redevelopment in 2001, a front-end evaluation was
conducted, again using a focus group
methodology. Content, design and interpretive
approach were considered in the research. The
research identified a need to represent
contemporary as well as historical issues in the
museum. Participants wanted to understand more
about how immigrants were granted permission to
come into the country – or how the decision to
deny permission was made. The research
supported the concept of a gallery about ‘getting in’
to Australia. Visitors also objected to being told
what to think about immigration. They wanted an
even-handed presentation of issues, different from
the approach they encountered in the media.
Participants expressed a strong desire for what they
referred to as a ‘factual’ approach: they wanted to
hear from both prospective migrants and asylum
seekers, as well as from government
representatives. Both personal and official
perspectives were needed.
14
14. The Immigration Museum in Melbourne is located in the Old
Customs House, originally built in 1867.
Getting In is the Immigration Museum’s
latest permanent exhibition, which documents the
immigration policies that have shaped Victoria and
Australia since the 1800s and how these policies
have been a significant factor in forming a national
identity. The Getting In interactive was designed
to involve visitors in the interview process for
prospective migrants at different periods in
Australia’s history. While the vignettes are
fictitious, they are based on curatorial research and
designed to be realistic.
Potential immigrants come from a range
of different countries and have varied levels of
wealth and employment skills. In the Getting In
interactive, visitors make a decision based on

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 Barriers and Drivers: building audience at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia
information given to them in ‘official’ documents
and, after witnessing the interview, give their
opinion on whether interviewees should be
granted permission to come to Australia. They are
then able to hear the official decision.
During development, two formative
evaluations were conducted to assist in meeting the
aim of producing an interactive that was intuitive
to use and would allow visitors to feel as if they
were involved in the interview - not struggling
with technology. Findings of the research were
‘workshopped’ with the curator, producer,
designer and others involved in development. The
visitor was at the centre of this discussion of ideas
for improvements. The resulting interactive allows
for individual or group use; it also invites people
to use their own preferences for the way they
approach the content: to start at the beginning
(historical), to see what happens now
(contemporary), or to make a choice based on
their own family immigration history (either by
period or nationality). Visitors also have a choice
how much government policy they read.
Even as it was being tested, Getting In
engaged participants who became involved in the
lives of those applying for residence in Australia.
They were able to empathize with applicants;
wanted them to have a chance; and felt sad when
they were rejected. This project was an outstanding
example of how research can be integrated
throughout exhibition development (not just at the
beginning), and how, through collaboration,
excellence can be achieved.
Getting In has been a great success with
visitors to the Immigration Museum. It also
Barbara Horn
received industry recognition in 2003: a Museum
Industry Recognition Award (Museums Australia,
Vic.); an Arts Victoria Portfolio Leadership Award;
an American Association of Museums Media and
Technology Committee Silver Muse Award
(Education/Interpretive – History and Culture);
and an Australian Writers’ Guild Award for the
script.
Motivational segmentation: barriers and drivers
Museum Victoria, the parent organization of which
the Immigration Museum is a part, first explored
market segmentation in 1997 using demographic,
attitude and leisure-choice variables to understand
visitors. More recently there has been a transition
to a motivational segmentation model. This
approach explores motivations of consumers,
including some of which they may not be
conscious. In doing so, it bypasses a common
problem with surveying methodology: we like to
think of ourselves as rational and logical, and will
explain our behaviour and choices in such a way
if asked directly. Motivational segmentation goes
beyond such surface responses to uncover
underlying needs, physical and psychological, and
motivations.
A key principle of the motivational
segmentation model is that there will be a
consumer need providing an underlying
motivation for the selection of a particular product
type on any given occasion. The model is able to
relate motivations to usage occasions, and thus
provides a powerful tool for developing marketing
strategy, new products, and managing and
positioning a brand portfolio. It has been used
effectively by Museum Victoria for these purposes.
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 81
TAKING A STANCE
The approach assists in thinking more
clearly about our market overall, understanding
the needs of visitors and potential visitors,
identifying target groups, designing products,
services, brands and communications which will
meet the needs of specific segments. It provides a
visual map, which is a powerful tool for strategic
thinking. There are four segments: a manageable
number with each of meaningful size in the total
population and clearly differentiated in terms of
motivational needs.
The segmentation model was developed in
late 2002 and has been effectively used for the
three campuses of Museum Victoria. The model
must, of course, be regularly updated so that it
stays in line with market changes – subsequent
research has validated the original model and
proved its continuing applicability. It is also
critical that staff understand the model and its
application, and are able to use the segmentation
correctly.
It was in 2004 that the model was first
reviewed against the Immigration Museum. This
boutique museum was found to cater for the needs
of a market segment described as ‘duty bound’. The
research established that needs of this segment
include a desire to share experiences with others
and to receive an emotional benefit from their
experiences.
Barriers and drivers: how the Immigration
Museum meets the needs of the ‘duty bound’
The research found that the Immigration Museum
can deliver an emotional journey incorporating
self-discovery and the creation of memories that
82 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
‘duty bound’ visitors seek from a museum visit.
Their need for an experience that incorporated full
engagement with content, and opportunities to
reminisce and feel a sense of belonging was met.
The experience is absorbing and meets an
orientation ‘for others’ as the visitor empathizes
and feels connected to the people whose stories are
represented. Visitors identified the greatest
strengths of the Immigration Museum as: an
interpretive style that explored immigration
experiences through personal stories; an
emotional, empathic connection; and the
presentation of trustworthy factual information.
This information was vitally important
when the Immigration Museum found itself
needing to build its local audience, in response to
declining numbers after the initial successful years:
45,000 visitors in 1999/2000, 30,000 in 2000/01,
26,000 in 2001/02, and less than 20,000 in 2002/03.
By understanding the motivational needs
of a key target market of the Immigration Museum,
marketing strategies could be developed,
highlighting the personal stories and emotional
journeys that it features. The research also found
that the Immigration Museum lacked a clearly
articulated brand identity and that this formed a
barrier to visitors’ understanding of what the
museum was trying to convey. Further, the
museum’s name, while not seen as inappropriate,
was not appealing, and did not help visitors to
identify the offer. This was all information that
could assist in working to attract visitors from
metropolitan Melbourne to the museum.
Alternative names were tested, but none
preferred – it was established that changing the
 Barriers and Drivers: building audience at the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia
name would not attract more visitors from
metropolitan Melbourne. However, development
of a tagline to indicate the personal stories and
emotional experience the museum delivers would
do so. As a result, the words ‘moving stories’ were
tagged to the name and used in a brand advertising
campaign. The campaign employed a mixture of
media presenting a suite of images showing the
human face of the immigration experience, and
emphasizing the ease of access of the museum at its
central city location. The tone was light, the theme
of journey and travel suiting the positioning of
advertisements in various locations where people
were in transit, as well as the content of the
museum.
The success of this approach can be
measured in recall and visitation impact. Results
from a Visitor Profile Survey in November 2004
indicated that the campaign had a significant
impact, with 13 per cent of visitors noting that they
had seen transit panels.
The initial brand campaign was followed
by two significant exhibition campaigns in October
2004 and October 2005. All worked to positively
impact on visitation that rose again, from 87,000 in
2002/03, to 101,600 in 2003/04 and 123,000 in
2004/05.
Industry awards have also recognized the
Immigration Museum’s achievements:
• Winner National Tourism Awards 2005,
2006 (Heritage and Cultural Tourism)
• Winner Victorian Tourism Awards 2003,
2004, 2005 (Best Cultural Attraction)
Barbara Horn
• Winner Drama Victoria’s Best Event 2004:
involving drama and theatre for students
• Winner Museum Industry Award – Best
Project 2005: ‘Station Pier: Gateway to a
New Life’
• Winner Cultural Diversity Week Volunteer
Award 2005.
The Immigration Museum experience now
And what do our visitors think now about their
visit to the Immigration Museum? Dedicated
research was conducted in January 2006 to find out
what project would have the greatest impact on the
Immigration Museum visitor experience. We
invited visitors – older, younger, families and
tourists – to the museum to take part in a series of
focus groups to tell us about their experience in the
museum. The research revealed a surprising gap
between expectation and experience.
The research establishes that visitors’ first
impression of the Immigration Museum is fairly
undifferentiated beyond the obvious delivery of an
immigration message. It can be considered ‘just
another museum’, with objects and perhaps some
new information to be learned. And it is relatively
unconnected to their lives. Furthermore, there is
little urgency to visit, especially for the local
audience. Their perception of museums as never
changing permits them to hold off visiting – ‘Can’t
go this weekend, maybe next weekend’. There is
no ‘call to action’ from a museum that is always
there and virtually always open. In sum, visitors
expect that their visit, driven by curiosity, interest
and duty, will result in an understanding of
immigration and migrants in Australia – this
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TAKING A STANCE
outcome is rational, expected and
undifferentiated.
However, once having visited the
Immigration Museum our visitors found that they
had experienced much more: the actual outcome is
unexpected and emotional. The Immigration
Museum engages and involves visitors beyond
their expectations providing an element of
surprise, an experience of being moved and a sense
of global connections. It is these emotional benefits
that are specific to the Immigration Museum.
At this time, then, the Immigration
Museum is in an extremely fortunate position.
Visitor numbers are adequate and sustainable, the
visitor experience delivers beyond the visitor’s
expectations (satisfaction levels are at 97 per cent)
and the communications about it reflect strongly
the nature of the museum. Awareness, defined as
knowledge of the location of the museum has
been the major barrier for the Immigration
Museum but it too has grown from 19 per cent of
the Victorian population in 2003 to 33 per cent
by 2005.
However, things cannot be allowed to
stand still! While the research revealed to us some
very reassuring things it also extended a challenge.
Part of the research brief was to identify any gaps
in the visitor experience – things they would like
to see as part of the offer, experiences that might
tap into our visitor needs and expectations. To
explore this we described proposed projects such
as a resource centre and extensions to our
exhibition programme. We also wanted to
entertain any ideas that were brought forward by
the research participants.
84 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
The results gave us pause to reflect, and are
challenging us to make a choice that may well
change the nature of the museum experience. The
research strongly indicates that we can successfully
continue to deliver more of the same kinds of
experience through development of the resource
centre and of exhibitions dealing with new topics
and using improved methods of delivery. Both will
serve to deliver more of the same highly
satisfactory experiences currently on offer so they
can evolve and continue to answer the needs and
expectations of visitors.
However, neither will shift the ‘brand
expectations’ or alter the current ‘brand story’. And
we might expect that visitor levels will remain
fairly constant and repeat visitation would
continue to be low, perhaps even fall. If, however,
we wish to shift perceptions of the Immigration
Museum, we could consider introducing a new
dimension that was identified through our visitor
research: a performance space offering ever-
changing, highly interactive opportunities for
celebration, debate and events. The introduction of
this unexpected but very interesting experience
could revolutionalize the Immigration Museum
offer, significantly exceeding expectations of our
visitors and therefore shifting brand perceptions,
encouraging repeat visits and attracting new
audiences.
The question facing us now is: What choice
will we make as we continue on the Immigration
Museum journey? We can offer our visitors
familiar, albeit interesting and enjoyable, routes, or
provide opportunities to set out in new directions
which may surprise, delight and transform their
experience.
Boston on the Frontier of the New
Urban Museum
by Anne D. Emerson

Anne Emerson was educated at Brown University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
and the Boston University School of Management. She is the president of the Boston Museum
Project, and past president of the Bostonian Society from 1998 to 2002. From 1988 to 1998,
she was executive director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard
University.

We know who we are and can share dreams for a

common future when our roots in the past are
strong.

Jill Ker Conway

Board Member, Boston Museum Project

The Boston Museum Project began in

Chicago twenty years ago at that city’s great
historical society in Lincoln Park. At that time,
when I stood in the society’s museum, it made me
realize that my own city, Boston, though 250 years
older than Chicago, had no real city museum
despite its remarkable historic sites, authentic
places of the early colony and the republic of the
United States.

The next decade of my career took me to

Harvard University where I worked for a time with
Robert Putnam who had just written Making
Democracy Work, a study of Italy as it devolved
its central government into sixteen regional
governments in 1971. Putnam studied the strength
of these regional governments by fielding teams of
researchers who tested the responsiveness of
different regional governments. They sent away for
driver’s licence applications, death certificates and

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TAKING A STANCE
the like. Their conclusion was that the
governments in the north of Italy were extremely
responsive; the governments in the south were not.
Taking their research to the next level they looked
at correlating factors in each society and found a
dense network of horizontal associations in the
north – choral societies, football leagues and the
like. In the south they found a vertically organized
society with a paternalistic approach. Historically,
the north was the place of tower societies watching
over their neighbours as they took their goods to
market and of the Medici family with its creation
of banking, based, of course, on societal trust.
The museum as a start up
As I encountered Robert Putnam’s research I
thought about my own city of Boston, settled by
many different immigrant groups, within which
there was much trust, but between which there was
little. I began to put together the idea of the
creation of a city museum rooted in history with
the idea of a museum that could be a social catalyst
deepening the horizontal trust relationships that
are so essential to a vital democracy. This is the
core of our concept. We hope to make it a reality.
The process of creating a major new
cultural institution as a start up in an American
context is one of developing a concept sufficiently
compelling that private individuals will support it
with their own funds. In our case, the Government
was supportive by giving us a prime site on the
new Rose Kennedy Greenway. It is not often that
a city has a chance to re-programme a major
section of its downtown area without a natural
disaster or war intervening. Boston had this chance
as a result of the removal of a major elevated
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highway next to the waterfront. The ‘Big Dig’ has
opened up 30 acres (12 hectares) of prime
parkland. There the Boston Museum will be one of
two cultural projects that will draw local and
international visitors.
Much of my time has been spent in recent
years making the economic argument for the
Boston Museum. I point out to my varied
audiences that American museums average
865 million visits a year and that this number has
increased by 50 per cent in a decade. There are
approximately 16,000 museums in the United
States, and in the brief period between 1998 and
2000, $4.3 billion was spent to build or expand
150 museums in the United States. Here 81 per
cent of American travellers, or 118 million people,
are considered historic/cultural travellers. That
number has risen 13 per cent from 1996. Cultural
travellers spend more than other types of voyagers,
an average of $623 compared with $456 per trip
(excluding transportation). In Massachussetts,
tourism is the third largest industry with $13.3
billion spent in 2000. Moreover, museums are big
employers. It surprises many people that the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston employs 1,300
people. A final point, museums are key factors in
what is now being called the creative economy
index based on Richard Florida’s work.1 The index
is a cluster of factors that determine whether a city
is going to attract creative, professional people,
which turns out to be a key economic driver in the
local economy. Museums are very much at the core
of that attraction of creative talent because they
augment the quality of life.
There are many examples of the great
museum building boom that has taken place in the

15. The scenic view of the museum by architectural illustrator Costantino, based on the designs by architect Moshe Safdie.
United States. More than thirty major new
museums across the country have been created,
among them, the 400,000 square-foot (33,160 m2)
Minnesota History Museum and the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame, a tremendous new attraction on
the shorefront of Cleveland, Ohio. We might
also mention, in the same state, the National
Underground Railroad Freedom Center in
Cincinnati opened in 2004, and the architect
Moshe Safdie’s Exploration Place in Wichita,
Kansas, a stunning $62 million project, which is
now on the cover of the state’s tourist brochure. In
Minnesota, the new Science Museum and the new
Children’s Museum illustrate the energy of one
community to anchor its public spaces with
cultural institutions and enliven a cold, wintry
climate with destination attractions. In
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, $350 million have
been invested in the revitalization of Independence
Mall and the creation of the National Constitution
Boston on the Frontier of the New Urban Museum
Anne D. Emerson
ª Boston Museum Project
15
Center. All over America, we are seeing the
creation of new urban museums. I believe this is, in
part, because cultural institutions are becoming,
with the globalization of corporations and their
separation from place, the brand identities of cities
and are enormous economic drivers for their
communities. Much of the funding of these
institutions has come from private citizens.
Five years ago, the board of directors of the
Boston Museum Project began work on the
development of the key goals of this new
institution. We knew it needed to be a spectacular
educational facility that would have high impact
on the youth, enabling them to learn about the city
in which they lived. We knew it needed to be a
place of great interest and excitement for the entire
community, as well as for visitors from outside
Boston, and that it had to be a common meeting
ground for our own citizens. We knew it needed to
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TAKING A STANCE
bring visitors to Boston for its economic
development and tourism. In order to succeed, the
Boston Museum had to have significant scale, high
visibility and outstanding quality. It had to be a
partner-based service organization that would
strengthen all of our small historic sites in the city
of Boston.
More recent work has made it clear that
this institution will be a family-focused museum, a
place where visitors will be encouraged to leave
their contributions and have their voices heard and
recorded, a place that will touch their hearts as
well as their minds, that it will entertain through
interactive engagement. Lastly, we hope it will be a
place that will transform our understanding of the
region and the people who live here.
The Boston Museum Project challenges
In making our case, we have sought to outline the
challenges that face Boston. The first is that we
have a history gap. Literally, we are missing
200 years of history in the presentation of the city’s
story. The story of the American Revolution is an
exciting, uncontested story that brings visitors
from all over the world. The 200 years of history
subsequent to that, which are the years that all of
our immigrant populations can connect to their
own story, are much more difficult and are
essentially told nowhere. That gives us a rich arena
of stories to explore. One approach may be to
compare cities like Boston and San Francisco at a
given moment in time, say 1849, when San
Francisco was created in a single moment with the
Gold Rush. People of every colour and stripe
arrived simultaneously with one thought on their
minds: to get rich. At the same moment in Boston
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we were receiving thousands upon thousands of
impoverished Irish refugees from the potato famine
in Ireland. In a decade the city population
increased to four times what it had been fifty years
before. Bostonians turned inward, started private
clubs and began the layering of our civic society.
Today we have a culture in which our many tribes
live in parallel worlds. San Francisco is a city noted
for its tolerance and energetic pursuit of wealth.
Boston is noted for its entrepreneurial energy and
its difficulty in collaboration.
Another challenge we have as a city is that
it is extremely difficult for our residents and our
visitors to navigate; we need visitor facilities that
will help them do that. We have many small under-
funded historic sites that together do not make a
critical mass, nor do they tell a coherent story.
Therefore the creation of an institution that would
create an overall narrative framework for these
stories seems crucial. We have a severe lack of
public exhibition space in Boston, and yet we also
have many outstanding museum collections that
cannot be seen because of the lack of space. So the
Boston Museum will offer 8,000-square feet
(745 m2) of travelling exhibit space.
The city is made up of 53 per cent non-
white people. We need to make new places and
new ways to include their voices in our city
dialogue. Boston is traditionally a place of
considerable tribalism and strong neighbourhood-
based ethnic communities. Making these
communities visible to each other is the key goal of
this institution. In addition to focusing our exhibits
on these issues of contemporary significance, we
also plan to have a Dialogue Center, a non-
hierarchical space for community conversations,

comparable to the Wosk Centre for Public
Dialogue in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
The global concept of the Boston Museum
is to create a new front door for Boston. The
National Park Service has been an important
partner in the planning of this new institution, in
the funding site and transportation analyses, a
needs assessment of other historical institutions
and an economic impact study which together
assess the value of this new institution at
$40 million annually for the region.
The Boston Museum will be located at
Columbus Park. Moshe Safdie’s extraordinary
design for the Museum won this parcel of land,
which lies in the heart of the historic district and
adjacent to the Faneuil Hall Marketplace where
20 million visitors come annually. The site
consists of the air rights over the tunnel exit
ramps at this spot. Safdie’s design cleverly conceals
these ramps under a hillside park, which is the
roof-top of three levels of museum programme.
Above the park floats a glass-and-steel structure
(enclosing gallery spaces) that resembles the hull
of a ship. In addition there will be a passage
through the building to connect the parkland on
either side, all in a free zone so that the public, as
they traverse the structure, can use it as a street
passing through the gateway orientation centre.
The gallery spaces are focused on five major
themes: people, innovation, history, sports and
environment. There will be a futures lab to make
visible the many studies and databases that allow
us to see the trajectory on which our city is
moving. The education centre is comprised of a
model building studio, a situation room and a
series of labs and classrooms. In addition, there
Boston on the Frontier of the New Urban Museum
Anne D. Emerson
will be function rental spaces, public meeting
rooms, a large ‘town hall’ space and the Dialogue
Center mentioned above. Each of these has
revenue implications for the museum.
The Boston Museum Project invested
heavily in visitor research, co-ordinating 650
intercept interviews and five focus groups. The
results of these surveys indicate that 96 per cent of
our residents and 90 per cent of foreign visitors are
interested in visiting the museum. Both residents
and visitors thought that this would increase their
interest in learning about Boston’s history and
visiting other sites. This was a critical argument to
calm the fears of the existing tourist and historic-
sites markets: we would not steal their visitors, but
rather we would increase the number of people
interested in visiting Boston overall.
The timeline for our opening begins with
our capital campaign in 2007. We hope to break
ground in 2010 and open in two stages in 2012 and
2013. This depends very much on our ability to
make the case to private donors. We are fortunate
that the case is a good one, the place is ideal and
the need is great.
NOTES
1. Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, 2004, and
Cities and the Creative Class, Routledge, 2005.
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 89
 The Intangible Dimension: from
the museum to the city – the case
of São Paulo
by Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues

Ana A. V. Rodrigues is an urban planner and architect. She is also a Ph.D. student at Campinas
University (UNICAMP) in Brazil. She has already worked as project manager of cultural
heritage projects at the Museum of the City of São Paulo. Among her publications are ‘A Classe
Operária vai ao Paraı́so’, in the magazine Sarau of the Centre of Memory of UNICAMP in 2004;
and Intervenções Públicas nas Cidades’ in Volume 2 of the Magazine of Architecture and
Urbanism of the State University of Goiás, Brazil, in 2003.

During the CAMOC conference, where we are

seeking to discuss the ‘city museums’ in the world,
I introduced a case-study of the ‘museum of the
city of São Paulo’ to try to contribute to furthering
discussion of the museum–city relation as an
architect and an urbanist, not as a museum studies
professional or a museum curator.

I work at the São Paulo City Hall as the

architect responsible for the management of
several urban intervention works in the historic
centre of São Paulo. I work more particulary with a
programme named ‘Prócentro’, which is financed
by the Inter-American Development Bank, and
includes the restoration of the Marchioness of
Santos’ mansion, the future ‘city museum’.

It is necessary to clarify this reference point

that will guide this article. I will deal mainly with
issues related to the city using architect/urbanist
tools, trying, however, to develop a conceptual
interdisciplinary view. Such positioning is only
possible if we read the city within the principle of a
‘cultural model,’ as defined by Françoise Choay.1

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 The Intangible Dimension: from the museum to the city – the case of São Paulo
ª Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
16
16. Front façade of the Marchioness of Santos’ Mansion Museum in
Sao Paulo.
According to Choay, during the twentieth
century urbanism established three great models:
the progressive model, connected to rationalism
and functionalism; the cultural model, considering
issues such as archaeology, museum studies and
cultural heritage; and the naturalist model, from
contact with nature that restores human beings
back to themselves.
In this article, I will try to conceptualize
the city with the knowledge generated by these
three models, although the ‘cultural’ model
remains the axis of my reflection. This model
seems to be indeed the most comprehensive and
appropriate for museum studies discussion.
I will also take into consideration issues of
the intangible dimension, understood as the sensory
universe, to contribute to the idea of the São
Paulo City Museum. Some experiences in the city,
Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
including my own, will be reported along with
theoretical conceptions. A number of questions will
guide our reflection on such a museum:
First of all, how can we catalogue the
individual opinions that contribute to determining
an assessment of the city? Secondly, how do we
privilege the emotional awareness of the urban
environment in the museum? Thirdly, how can we
work with the building that houses the museum,
since it is also a ‘cultural document’ made in and
for the city? Fourthly, how do we think of the
urban relation between centre and suburbs, since
the museum is located in a building in the so-
called ‘historic centre’? Starting from the principle
that the collection of a city museum is the city
itself, how to move from the museum to the city?
Lastly, how can we understand the city from both
a contemporary and a historical perspective?
In order to try and answer these questions, I have
divided my article into four parts seeking to move
‘from the museum to the city’.
The Museum of the City of São Paulo
The Historic Museum of São Paulo, located in the
Marchioness of Santos’ mansion, will furnish the
place and collection from which to build a city
museum, according to what is currently
established by the São Paulo Office of Culture
(Secretaria Municipal de Cultura de São Paulo).
The museum was created along with the Secretaria
de Cultura da Prefeitura on 13 January 1975, from
the organization of the Division of Iconography
and Museums (Divisão de Iconografia e Museus)
within the structure of the São Paulo Department
of Historic Heritage (Departamento Municipal de
Patrimônio Histórico).
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 91
TAKING A STANCE

The first initiative was the ‘Street Museum’,

whose idea came from Julio Abe Wakahara, using
the extensive collection of existing photographs of
the city, and exhibited in the city itself.2 The idea
was to contribute to the desacralization of the
collection, and to establish a new way of past and
present argumentation with city dynamics.3 This
experience, as well as other policies of the Division
of Museums (Divisão de Museus) that consisted of
decentralizing museums in city neighbourhoods,
led to a project for a ‘city museum’ in 1985. This
project was initially created by Ulpiano T. Bezerra de
Menezes, who proposed, in sum: ‘A city museum
that is neither a mystifying space of the past, nor a
diluter of social contradiction. In order to become

ª Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues

cultural heritage for all citizens, the museum should
contain everything that has been significant to the
construction and transformation of the city.’4

Such a ‘city museum’ should not rescue a

nostalgic past of the city or impose an order inside
the urban chaos. The intention of the city museum
17
should not be to please the visitor but should address
themes not generally discussed in museums, such as: 17. The transitory monumental – Patriarca Square in Sao Paulo.

urban marginalization, the housing crisis, pollution,

violence, social tension, etc. A free reading of its collection

Discussions around the creation of a
museum of the city of São Paulo continued until
2004, and a project was developed that foresaw
permanent exhibitions around five themes:
territory, population, economy, sociopolitical
movements and sustainability. However, this
museum was not established. The existing
historical museum, located in the Marchioness of
Santos’ mansion, was then proposed, and from its
experience we may discuss what a ‘city museum ‘of’
and a museum ‘for’ the city of São Paulo would be.
The existing collection of this building today
consists of items from different historical periods,
especially photography and indigenous
ethnography. According to museum employees,
visitors are ‘passers-by who enter the place out of
curiosity’, and intermediate-school students. A
comment made by a 14-year-old student, provides
some clues on the dimension of the intangible
which we would like to introduce. Looking at a
marble bathtub in the museum, the teenager said
that it was the place where the Marchioness of

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 The Intangible Dimension: from the museum to the city – the case of São Paulo
Santos bathed with Emperor Don Pedro. His
classmates laughed in a malicious way, typical of
boys of that age. First, it is important to say that we
do not know for sure if the bathtub belonged to
the famous Marchioness of Santos at the beginning
of the nineteenth century; it was found in the
building by the São Paulo Gas Company in the first
decades of the twentieth century, and it is not an
object that strictly contextualizes a certain period
or location, nor is it a ‘factual document’. Secondly,
to understand the student’s comment, it is
necessary to know that Pedro I was the emperor
who claimed independence for Brazil in 1822,
after returning from a visit to the Marchioness of
Santos, who was publicly his lover, which in the
Brazilian imagination is related to male ‘virility’.
It is important to explore how the individual
imagination forms the collective imagination from
an object such as a ‘bathtub’. And also, how
such an object gains significance beyond the
intended meaning of exhibition curators, in an
intangible cultural movement.
The need to answer questions of value and
the preservation of culture brought experts
together at a conference in Nara (Japan) in 1994,
where the ‘Authenticity in Relation to World
Heritage Convention’5 was discussed. Until then,
the criteria used to understand and intervene in
cultural heritage had only the obsolete Venice
Charter (1964) as a parameter.
The ‘Nara Document’ resulted, then, from
the necessity of bringing greater respect for
cultural and heritage diversity to conservation
practice. It enhanced the concepts of the Venice
Charter on one hand, and on the other, responded
to the effect of homogenization created by the
Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
ª Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
18
18. Bathtub of the Marchioness of Santos’ house Museum in Sao Paulo.
current forces of globalization.6 The ‘Nara
Document’ states that every culture demands
respect and its heritage should be considered
within the cultural contexts to which they belong:
‘All judgements about values attributed to cultural
property as well as the credibility of related
information sources may differ from culture to
culture, and even within the same culture. It is
thus not possible to base judgements of values and
authenticity within fixed criteria.’7
Regarding the ‘bathtub’ of the Marchioness
of Santos’ mansion in the city of São Paulo, one
would look at it differently from the collective
Brazilian imagination, resulting in an immediate
dismissal of the object, because of its non-
characterization as factual ‘document’ or
‘monument’, bearing a scientific, objective truth.
The discussion on collective memory and history
materials took a shift with the ‘New History’ in the
late 1970s.8 According to Jacques le Goff, one of
the early theorists of this discipline, a document is
not innocuous, or naive, it is the result of a
conscious or unconscious meaning of the society
that produced it, and other historic eras, even
though it has remained silent: ‘A document is a
monument. It results from the effort of historic
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 93
TAKING A STANCE
societies to impose on the future – voluntarily or
involuntarily – a certain image of themselves.
There is no document truth.’9
Thus, the notion of historical fact was
challenged, and a history of representations was
created which took several forms: the history of
ideologies (which is the history of global
conceptions of society), the history of mentalities
(translated by mental structures common to a
society), the history of the imaginary (which does
not connect to text productions, but to word,
gesture, and image), and the history of the
symbolic (this includes practices, rituals, and
relates to a hidden reality).10
In a museum context, how should the
interpretation of the ‘Marchioness of Santos’
bathtub’ as imagined by the student, be dealt with?
Would it be theoretically contemplated in the
history of the symbolic? Néstor Garcia Canclini’s
work on ritual and heritage, in his analysis of the
National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City,
will be useful for our discussion.11 As Canclini
explains, the museum is a space of rituals and
habits. It contains symbols of identity, objects, and
memories, things that no longer exist, though they
are kept because they allude to origin and
essence.12
Furthermore, according to Canclini, it is
rare that a ritual openly alludes to conflicts
between ethnicity, classes, and groups; thus, the
rite is brought into society as a device to neutralize
heterogeneity. On the other hand, museums
ritualize heritage by organizing facts, and by
approving, in the symbolic world, the differences
established by social inequality, because ‘those who
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do not share the same symbols, rituals, and habits
are the others, the different ones.’13
For the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, the
worst opponent of cultural traditionalism ‘is not
the one who does not visit museums, or does not
understand art, but the painter who, when
transgressing heritage, puts the face of an actress
on the Virgin’s face... the baroque-expert musician
who mixes his compositions with jazz and rock.’14
Such hybrid constructions of cultural, erudite and
popular knowledge, found in the joke of the boy
about the bathtub from the museum collection at
the marchioness’ mansion, becomes a space of
transgression, going beyond the symbolic and
being perhaps closer to Bourdieu’s conception,
‘trying to answer the question ‘‘what is an
individual?’’, searching for the possible margins of
freedom that this individual has against social
mechanisms that produce him, while at the same
time, closing him off.’15
The former mansion of the Marchioness of Santos
The Marchioness of Santos’ mansion is located
near the place where the city of São Paulo was
founded. The mansion was preserved because it is
one of the only remaining examples of eighteenth-
century urban architecture in São Paulo, built with
a typical and traditional São Paulo building
technique, the taipa de pilão. Maria Domitila de
Castro e Mello, the Marchioness of Santos, bought
the building in 1867, and transferred it to her son,
Commander Felı́cio Pinto de Mendonça e Castro.
In 1880, the property was acquired by the
Administrative District, and a neo-classical façade
was added. The São Paulo Gas Company bought it
in 1909 for use as its office until 1982 when the São
 The Intangible Dimension: from the museum to the city – the case of São Paulo
Paulo City Hall took it over to house the city
history museum. In 1991, the mansion was
restored, but it still needs structural interventions,
and new restoration has been planned in the
framework of the Prócentro city-centre
rehabilitation programme, financed by the Inter-
American Development Bank.
During the 1991 intervention, the criteria
used were the preservation of every historical
period the building has gone through, according to
the 1964 Venice Charter, thus creating overlapping
historical environments. Such restoration favours
the maintenance of historical periods on the
property itself. It is the ‘historical value’
overlapping the ‘aesthetic value’, according to the
theory of value conceptions by Aloı̈s Rı̈egl and
Cesari Brandi.16
The Prócentro urban rehabilitation programme
The new ongoing restoration project of the
Marchioness of Santos’ mansion is part of the
central area rehabilitation programme, Prócentro,
whose general objective is ‘to promote economic
and social development with diversity in central
São Paulo. The purpose is to spur development and
create conditions that will attract and support
activities compatible with the metropolitan central
area, fostering urban renewal, environmental
remediation, and social mainstreaming.’17
Some considerations on central and
suburban concepts in São Paulo are useful to
understand and contextualize the museum location.
The concept of ‘centre’ is complex: the reality of
developing countries does not always adapt to
traditional urban theories. The case of São Paulo,
Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
and the inclusion of the museum in this context,
requires specific considerations. The Sé and
República districts of São Paulo are considered the
‘historic core’ of the central area, with an extensive
financial system, public services (mainly legal),
retail and wholesale commerce. In the 1950s, the
city centre started being divided into two parts: the
south-western part, close to the municipal theatre,
which is the wealthy area, featuring shops,
restaurants, offices, and even mansions close to São
Luis Street and the ‘old centre’, which is a more
popular area. The so-called ‘decadence’ or
‘deterioration’ of central São Paulo is related to the
exodus of high- and middle-income classes, in the
1960s and 1970s. With the departure of the middle
class, street vendors and low-income populations
moved to this area. In the 1980s and 1990s, higher
social classes expanded in a circumference around
neighbourhoods close to the centre (currently called
‘expanded centre’,) because the area had benefited
from road improvements, such as tunnel, road,
and highway construction, causing a migration of
important economic activities towards the south-
western area.18 As a result, the ‘historic centre’
became secondary to the ‘expanded centre’, thus
inverting the centre-suburbs relationship. This
analysis infers that a location has no vitality if high-
income populations are absent, and that the city
centre suffers an ‘ageing’, detrimental, process of
‘decadence’. But is it correct to say that the centre
lacks vitality and that the area should be revitalized?
The historical and social dimension of the city
Understanding the generating and transforming
process of a city has been privileged by some city
planners and despised by others. Le Corbusier,
in 1933, in his famous Athens Charter, proposed
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 95
TAKING A STANCE
the demolition of housing sites and the
preservation of great monuments in the historical
city. In 1909, Camillo Sitte, a critic of Le Corbusier
and of functionalism, was trying to value the city
through artistic principles, understanding the
process of their historical formation. Sitte’s thought
was later sanctioned by Giulio Garlo Argan,
who demonstrated that the architect-urbanist’s
function in a city is related to the decision of
preservation projects. For Argan: ‘Planning
projects is preserving and transmitting!’ Because
when existing properties are preserved, we are
preserving what is valuable, attributing a meaning
different from the original. The space of the
contemporary city cannot be separated from its
past. For Stella Bresciani: ‘Cities bear overlapping
layers of material waste: architectural elements,
monuments or streets. Seldom maintained in
their integrity, they survive in the form of
fragments, residue from other times, material
support for memory, past memories written in the
present.’19
Today, São Paulo has a fragmented
memory. It was physically rebuilt three times in
approximately 100 years, and ideologically
‘constructed’ to accept this reality. However, it is
on the location of the foundation of the city that
the headquarters of the museum will be
established. It is there that the existing memory
layers once again become sacred, reinforcing their
vocation of ‘historic centre’. ‘Centre’ in this
context, however, means something different from
the social view introduced earlier.
São Paulo was the most industrialized
region in Brazil in the 1950s, receiving a huge
migratory influx, added to the absence of a public
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policy for urban development. This situation has
generated enormous instability in several layers of
the population. In 1970, the State of São Paulo was
responsible for 58.2 per cent of the industrial
production value in Brazil, and the capital city was
responsible for approximately 15 per cent.
Currently, the city is responsible for about 9 per
cent of the country’s industrial production, a
percentage more significant than any other state in
the nation. The city is home to great industrial and
financial groups, and is the largest metropolis in
South America, called a World City; it is also
the main industrial centre in the country due to the
dynamics of its tertiary sector. Consequently, the
city growth and development assume endless
proportions. Today, the municipality of São Paulo
has the largest population in Brazil, and is the third
most populated in the world.
With the globalization process, São Paulo
has focused competitively on industrial activity
and technological advance. As a natural result,
unemployment and informal employment have
grown, thus increasing criminality and social
deterioration in the city. That is, the dynamics
generated by fast growth in the 1950s and 1960s
add up to the dynamics of a ‘new São Paulo’ which
tries to meet the needs of a ‘Global City.’20 The São
Paulo metropolitan area is made up of six
regions: ABC, Moji das Cruzes, Guarulhos, Franco
da Rocha, Osasco, and Taboão da Serra. Road
planning towards micro-regions, confined within a
100 km diameter, from central São Paulo, also
induces growth, expanding the suburban
limits.These micro-regions are: Campinas, São José
dos Campos, Jundiaı́, Sorocaba, and Santos. These
suburbs have reached the city limits. Half the
population of São Paulo lives on the outskirts of
 The Intangible Dimension: from the museum to the city – the case of São Paulo
the city, close to the environmental areas that were
previously rural areas. Since the beginning of the
1990s, the suburbs have no more space to expand,
generating water supply and air quality control
problems for the whole municipality. The
Metropolitan Area along with the micro-regions
has an approximate population of 24 million, a
population that circulates around the historic
centre and could, consequently, pass by the former
Marchioness of Santos’ mansion. The target-
audience of the museum may be drawn upon the
understanding of such dynamics.
The intangible dimension of the city
In Brazil, preservation of intangible heritage was
first recognized in 1996. A recent decree, dated 12
April 2006, aims at promulgating the UNESCO
Convention for Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural
Heritage.21 Several intangible cultural properties
have already been listed since the 1996 decree. An
organized event presents the diversity of this theme
and how it is reinterpreted in the popular
imagination. This experience was reported by the
architect, Victor Hugo Mori, a technician who
works at the Institute of National History Heritage
(Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico Nacional).
Acarajé, a typical food from the state of Bahia, and
a result of the African heritage in Brazil, has been
listed as an intangible cultural heritage item. In
2005, there was a large out-door party in the city of
São Paulo, at Paulista Avenue, one of the main
economic areas of the city, to celebrate the victory
of a football team. The City Hall had prohibited
street vendors from selling their products and, on
this celebration day, there was a lady wearing a
typical costume from Bahia, trying to sell acarajé,
even though it was not allowed. When the police
Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues
providing security for the event and monitoring
the street vendors saw the lady from Bahia, they
remembered a TV programme promoting acarajé
as historical heritage and worthy of being
protected. They immediately offered to ‘protect’
the lady, considered as a personification of the
national historical heritage, and they allowed her
to be the only street vendor admitted at the event.
The lady from Bahia, while knowing very little
about intangible heritage issues, requested
permission from the Institute of National Artistic
and Historical Heritage to participate in every
event in the city of São Paulo. This
‘misunderstanding’ or ‘inability’ to use the citizen’s
own tools to decode reality has an internal
correspondence: his/her own inner universe of
desires that is also often remote.22 Thinking of how
these citizens will recognize themselves or
appropriate a city such as São Paulo as their own,
and how to think of a ‘museum of (for) the city’,
one cannot ignore the territory of subjectivity and
its sensible apprehension. Anne Coquelin, in her
work, Essai de Philosophie Urbaine23, claims that
those memories that make up a city are always
changing forms and become necessary elements of
the mixing operation, by which condensations of
time and displacements that cause sensible
changes in the city awareness, reach us. Thus,
according to Coquelin, urban matter is formed by a
leading wire of opinion, as a changing memory
transmitter, transporting pieces of both historical
and personal memories. The construction of the
‘sensible city’ and its identity, such as Alain
Corbin24 explains, goes beyond its materiality and
includes the sensory appreciation through its
sounds, odours and movement, by mainly the
feeling that exceeds the limits of such perceptive
apprehension, and that can only be partial,
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 97
TAKING A STANCE
momentary, and determined by specific space
practices. Each individual who experiences the city
plays his or her own setting with the daily scenes,
according to their perceptive habits, sensible
culture, anxiety and concerns, their more or less
strict submission to nostalgia and to imaginary
fascination.25
The return to the museum
In this proposal, extrapolating the limits of the
museum interior becomes the fundamental step
to evisaging a ‘museum for the city’. Museum
studies professionals have already proposed ideas
towards a ‘non-museum attitude’ for their
collections, such as, for example, setting the pieces
within their original contexts (though such
contexts may also be museum-related). This
conception is in accordance with the assumptions
of intangible property preservation set forth in the
Nara Document. It is not a matter of banning
objects from museum collections, monuments, or
city facilities. Propositions to break with the
past were already made by modern architects and
city planners at the beginning of the twentieth
century. These were criticized, as Argan
summarizes:
Although the urbanism professional does not plan
to preserve anything, his/her projects to preserve those
ideas by which the concept of not preserving anything and
changing everything was formed. Whoever really believes that
the city of tomorrow will be completely, radically different
from the past and current city (which, after all, would mean a
city totally deprived of memory), and whoever actually
wanted it to be this way, could only conceive one project: the
total, absolute destruction of the world. Unfortunately, this
project exists, but the atomic bomb was not invented by city
planners.
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The aspect of intangible, which I believe to
be intriguing is that of the imaginary at play
concerning the ‘Marchioness of Santos’ bathtub’
and the acarajé of the street vendor from Bahia, in
search for a possible space of freedom. How do we
deal with this issue in a museum sense? I believe
the answer is only possible within a
multidisciplinary view, which will perhaps be
elaborated during the CAMOC Conference.
I maintain the reflection, showing only my
analysis using architectural tools, for it is the
mediation between the inner and outer spaces,
between the museum and the city, between the
tangible and intangible, an intermediate extraction
between interior and exterior, as in Deleuze’s
words: ‘Exterior and interior are relative and they
only exist by their changes thanks to the excerpt
that correlates them.’26 The building itself should
contain an intangible, multiple freedom space,
with no meanings, with no functional
manipulation, a space of Proustian oblivion, a
space of absence. As Jacques Derrida says, ‘Absence
is the soul of question’.27 Absence in the
architectural space opposes the universalism and
unitary thinking of modern architecture, where
space should influence people’s lives, and ‘form
should follow function’. Igor Guatelli28, in his
study on the application of the Derridian concept
in architecture, explains that absences are capable
of producing presences, not to show ways, not to
solve conflicts, not to guarantee, but as a space
creation with previous destinations, spaces for the
production of unpredicted meanings, which will
take place through their constant re-meanings, as
experienced in the space of the ‘museum of the
city’ in Campinas, before becoming a museum.
 The Intangible Dimension: from the museum to the city – the case of São Paulo
Ana Aparecida Villanueva Rodrigues

NOTES 17. Texto base de consolidação da proposta global de revisão do

Procéntro, November, 2005.

1. Choay, Françoise (1992) O urbanismo em questão, Editora Perspectiva,
São Paulo.
2. Bruno, Maria Cristina Oliveira. (2004) A Musealização em São Paulo: os
caminhos interpretativos da cidade. Expedição São Paulo 450 anos, uma
viagem por dentro da metrópole - museu da cidade de São Paulo,
Secretaria Municipal de Cultura e Instituto de Polı́ticas Públicas Florestan
Fernandes, São Paulo, p. 29.
18. Comin, Álvaro A. (2004) Caminhos para o Centro: Estratégias de
desenvolvimento para a região central de São Paulo, Empresa Municipal
de Urbanização – EMURB, São Paulo.
19. Bresciani, Maria Stella. Imagens de São Paulo, Estética e Cidadania.
20. Meyer, Regina Maria Prosperi; Grostein, Marta Dora; Biderman, Ciro.
(2004) SP Metrópole, Editora EDUSP.

3. Ibid. 21. Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico Artı́stico Nacional (IPHAN), Decree

No. 5753, 12 April 2006.
4. Menezes, Ulpiano T. Bezerra de. (1985) O Museu na Cidade X A Cidade
no Museu. Para uma abordagem histórica dos museus de cidade. Revista 22. Freire, Cristina (1997) Além dos Mapas:os monumentos no imaginário
Brasileira de História, 5 (8/9), São Paulo, p. 197. urbano contemporâneo, SESC:Annablume, São Paulo.

5. The Nara Document on Authenticity, http://www.international.icomos. 23. Coquelin, Anne (1982) Essai de Philosophie Urbaine, PUF, Paris, in
org/naradoc_eng.htm. Bresciane, Maria Stella, As sete portas da cidade. Revista Espaço e
Debates, No. 34, São Paulo, 1991, p. 13.
6. Ibid.

24. Corbin, Alain. (1998) Do Limousin às culturas sensı́veis. In: Rioux,
7. Ibid. Jean-Pierre & Sirinelli, Jean-François, Para uma nova História Cultural.
Estampa, Coleçao Nova História, Vol. 34, São Paulo, p. 108.
8. Einaudi Encyclopedia.

25. Ibid., p. 107.

9. Le Goff, Jacques (2003) História e Memória. Editora UNICAMP,
Campinas, pp. 537–8. 26. Deleuze, Mil Platôs, Vol. 1, p. 64.

10. Ibid., p. 11. 27. Derrida, Jacques. (1995) A escritura e a diferença. Editora Perspectiva,
São Paulo, p. 59.
11. Canclini, Néstor Garcia.

28. Guatelli, Igor. (2006) A marquise do Parque Ibirapuera e manifestação

12. Ibid., p. 191. do conceito derridiano entre: arquitetura como suporte de ações. São
Paulo: Revista Vitruvius. Arquitextos 070; webite at http://www.vitruvius.
13. Ibid., pp. 190–3.

14. Bourdieu, Pierre. (2003) O mercado de bens simbólicos, in Figueiredo,

Juliane, Memoria, Felipe & Santos, Ailton, Puc Rio de Janeiro, Programa
de Mestrado em Design.

15. Ibid.

16. Brandi, Cesari.

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 99

 The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
Museum: prospects and
challenges
by Sergey Y. Grishin

Since October 2002, Sergey Grishin has been director of the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
Museum and Exhibition Centre, at Salekhard, in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous district,
Siberia. He is the author of several publications on the development of museum work in the
Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.

Modern society sets forth a twofold task for all

museums: to conserve and to participate. It is
primordial and essential for any museum to
perform the first function, be it a large or small,
international or local institution. Social,
environmental and cultural challenges require
more and more from the modern museum to put
the task of participating into practice.

Located in the extreme north of Western

Siberia, Yamal-Nenets autonomous district is far
from being removed from all these topical issues.
On the one hand, it represents a region with a
unique, well-preserved culture of indigenous
peoples: the Khanty- and Mansy-speakers
(Western Siberian languages) and the Nenets
(Samoyedic language). On the other hand, it is a
dynamic developing territory with enormous
hydrocarbon and mineral resources (oil, gas and
ore) that raise complex issues over environmental
and cultural protection. Finding common ground
between the protection of traditional and cultural
values and assets and the necessity to evolve is
another topical issue for indigenous and migrant
populations.

100 ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) ª UNESCO 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum: prospects and challenges
19. The building of the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum.
The only city on earth that is located
directly on the Polar Circle, Salekhard is an
administrative, business and cultural centre of the
Yanal-Nenets autonomous district. The city was
founded in 1595; it is a member of the Historical
Cities and Regions Union, and the Cities of the Far
North Union. Salekhard was granted the gold
Patrons of the Century award by the International
Charitable Foundation for the glorious traditions
of patronage and charity, achievements and social
influence aimed at Russia’s revival. The city was
also inscribed in the Golden Book of the Nation.
The city has a population of 39,000,
composed of almost 100 nationalities. Launched
in 1995, the city development programme
transformed a town with two-storey wooden
buildings from the ancient Obdorsk settlement, and
houses built during the mid-nineteenth-century
Sergey Y. Grishin
ª The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum
19
railway construction, into a state-of-the-art city
with modern buildings and offices.
Nowadays, municipal housing and real
estate occupy thousands of square metres. Recent
constructions from 2000–04 by far exceed those of
the past years. In this building fever, fifty-three
buildings devoted to cultural activities were
erected. Transformed into a dynamic Arctic centre,
Salekhard welcomes and hosts important national
and international forums.
Since the beginning of the 1980s,
Salekhard has become a centre for the oil and gas
industry with its prospects and challenges. To
quote the governor of the Yamal-Nenets
autonomous district, Yuri V. Neyolov: ‘With
economics of such a scale, with billions of [sic] gas
and investments, it is traditional economy and
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 101
TAKING A STANCE

ª The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum

20

20. Findings of a Gydan mammoth by the 2005 paleonthological expedition of the Yamal-Nenets Museum.

agriculture, the basis for activity of indigenous
peoples of the North that should become our top
priority.’
The museum’s missions
In 1906, the Senior of the Obodor Mission, Father
Superior Irinarkh (I. S. Shemanovsky) founded a
museum devoted to the ethnographic collections of
the native peoples of the Tobolsk North. In Soviet
times the Ethnographic Collections of the Tobolsk
North was renamed the Obodor-Yamal Bureau of
Local Lore Museum. The museum was later
granted regional status and was renamed the
Yamalo-Nenets Local Lore Okrug Museum. There
are over 40,000 objects housed in the museum
today. In the year of its ninetieth anniversary, the
Local Lore Okrug Museum was named after its
creator Ivan Shemanovsky. In October 2002, one
of the oldest cultural institutions merged with
the young Exhibition Centre. Yuri Neyolov,
Governor of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous
Okrug, issued a decree to establish the
Shemanovsky Yamalo-Nenets Okrug Museum and
Exhibition Complex.
To establish the link between the mission
and the indigenous population, the Father

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 The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum: prospects and challenges
Superior believed that it was vital to carry out
research on their lifestyle, to try to gain a deeper
understanding of their values and beliefs. His
conviction laid the cornerstone of the museum‘s
activity. The museum and a library in Obdorsk
(formerly Salekhard) accounted for 5,000 books
by well-known scientists and researchers
(Matias Kastren, Kustaa Karialinen, Konstantin
D. Nosilov, Boris M. Zhitkov). The largest part of
the library collection, devoted to Northern studies,
proved to be very popular with library visitors. The
museum carefully conserved the established
traditions during the 1920s. With the museum as
their facilitator, the exiled and town dwellers
established the key principle of their existence on
knowledge through mutual understanding. To
illustrate this, the scholar Vladimir P. Evladov
conducted several expeditions to investigate and
interpret the language and mode of life of
indigenous peoples of Yamal in a systematic,
controlled and scientific manner.
Vladimir Evladov’s findings and personal
belongings have often been exhibited in the
museum; photographs and findings of his
expedition in 1928/29 have been published.
Another book of his 1935/36 expedition has been
prepared for publication.
Thus there is a clear line of succession to
the museum: from its founder I. S. Shemanovsky
and scholars, researchers, explorers and folklore
specialists to the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
Museum and Exhibition Centre, which has become
a museum of a new type.
In 2002, the governor of Yamal-Nenets
autonomous district, Yuri V. Neyolov, initiated the
Sergey Y. Grishin
establishment of the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
Museum and Exhibition Centre. High standards
of information technologies, social and cultural
performance, input from leading specialists,
emphasis on indigenous culture and traditions,
co-operation with authorities at all levels: such are
the major landmarks in the museum’s profile.
It is in this context that the Museum and
Exhibition Centre of Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
has acquired its status as a leading institution. Its
aim is to preserve, research, revive and disseminate
traditional indigenous culture while sustaining a
dynamic development of the region. The main
activities of the museum and exhibition centre are
to maintain the museum exhibits’ growth, to carry
out research and accumulate data, to implement
educational and cultural programmes fully
reflecting the collection and research findings of
the museum, and to bring this knowledge to all
visitors. Youth programmes are undoubtedly of
special importance to the museum.
The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum
and Exhibition Centre houses archives, exhibition
rooms, research departments (for contemporary
history, natural history, archaeology, ethnography,
regional arts and educational programmes), a
library, an exhibition centre, a youth teaching
museum centre and a branch of the L. V. Laptsui
Museum. The total museum area is 6,900 m2 of
which 2,300 m2 are devoted to exhibition and
350 m2 to storage.
At present, the collections of the museum
are made up of more than 43,000 ethnographic,
archaeological, natural history and historical
pieces, unique pictures of the history of the city
ISSN 1350-0775, No. 231 (Vol. 58, No. 3, 2006) 103
TAKING A STANCE
and the region, more than 10,000 books, including
rare editions, and 1,000 files of archives. The
museum can be proud of its unique collections,
such as archaeological findings from the ancient
burial ground of Ust-Polui (first century B.C.), the
medieval bronze and silver articles, and the
palaeontological findings of a Gydan mammoth
from the 2004/05 expedition.
The following research areas are top
priority to the museum: history, culture, traditions,
philosophy and religion. The museum adheres to
the values of cultural heritage, protection and
rebirth of indigenous cultures by carrying out
research and exploration in all fields: ethnography,
archaeology, palaeontology and folklore. The
museum annually conducts an archaeological
expedition, the Yamal archaeological expedition, to
investigate the archaeological sites of Yamal-Nenets
autonomous district, and carries out archaeological
surveys of the artefacts. During the past three years,
excavations at Ust-Voikarsk revealed defence and
living constructions from the fourteenth to the
nineteenth century and provided more than 3,000
pieces, including wooden carvings, ornamented
birch-bark, and silver and bronze articles. In
autumn 2003, exceptionally well-preserved
remains of a mammoth were reported to have been
found near the Leskino settlement situated north of
the Gydan peninsula. In 2004/05, the Shemanovsky
Yamal-Nenets Museum and the Institute for Plant
and Animal Research Ecology, the Ural branch of
the Russian Academy of Science, conducted a joint
expedition to investigate the remains under the
supervision of Dr P. N. Kosintsev. Again, the
expedition resulted in a unique collection of
palaeontological artifacts. There are no more than
four or five samples of this kind in the world, and
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only two museums – the St Petersburg Zoological
Museum and the Yakutsk Mammoth Museum – can
boast of having better preserved remains.
Museum pedagogy contributes to
performing an educative function in the district.
Information about archaeology and archaeological
resources reaches the public of the district in a
form that they can readily understand and
appreciate by providing an accurate explanation of
archaeological investigations and their results. It
also helps to develop a cultural and social network
by taking an active part in local and international
conferences and exhibitions.
The museum is a perfect venue for art and
industrial exhibitions, presentations and lectures.
It has already hosted various exhibitions, including
Yamal Medicine, Building and Architecture and
Magic Poetry of a Costume. Other exhibitions were
devoted to archaeology, such as Yamal Land, Life
and Expeditions of V. P. Evladov and regional
exhibitions of bone carvings, The Heart of the
North, or of local historical themes, such as the
shows on the Chelyabinsk and Tyumen regions. In
line with its social and educational mission, the
museum initiated the campaign against drug abuse,
and organized events devoted to indigenous
culture.
The museum’s international exposure
The Museum and Exhibition Centre plays an active
role in various local and international events and
focuses on developing a co-operative network.
Collaboration with major institutions of the
Russian Federation has proved to be very fruitful:
among partners can be mentioned the State
 The Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets Museum: prospects and challenges
Hermitage, the Peter the Great Museum of
Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera),
the State Museum of the East (Moscow), the
Museum of the Siege of Leningrad, the Central
Exhibition Hall, the Russian Academy of Science,
Department of Ecology, the Institute for
Archaeology and Ethnography of the Russian
Academy of Science, the Tomsk and Ural state
universities and the Yamal branch of the Institute
for History and Archaeology of the Russian
Academy of Science.
The Museum has built international
partnerships with the M. Cherny Gallery of Eskimo
Art (Switzerland), the Smithsonian Institution
(Washington, D.C., USA), the National Park in
Hungary and the Royal Alberta Museum
(Edmonton, Canada). Thanks to a partnership
with the German company, Rotstein Vitrinen
GmbH, modern equipment was received which
allows maintaining optimal storage conditions.
The partnership has also permitted the
introduction of new methods of work and the
possibility of carrying out projects with leading
museums in the country.
In May 2005, within the framework of the
75th anniversary of the district, the Museum and
Exhibition Centre held the first regional museums
festival to facilitate collaboration between
museums of the Yamal-Nenets autonomous
district. During the course of the festival, the
museum was awarded two grants by the Canadian
Agency of International Development: one for an
ethnographic puppet theatre and the other for a
traditional crafts studio. Furthermore, in July 2005
the museum took part in the Canadian province
of Alberta’s centennial, which marked the
Sergey Y. Grishin
development of partnership and future co-
operation between Canada and Yamal. Establishing
strong bridges of mutual appreciation and
understanding between the peoples of different
cultures has undoubtedly become one of the top
priorities of the museum’s activity.
In 2006, the Shemanovsky Yamal-Nenets
Museum and Exhibition Centre, one of the oldest
Western Siberian museums, will celebrate its
centenary. The establishment of the museum has
broadened the scope of research and has made
important contributions to the cultural rebirth of
Yamal’s cultural heritage.
The oral culture of peoples of the Russian
North is a particular communication system
reflected in a unique art of sculpture, plastic art
and ornaments, deeply rooted in mythology. Bone
carving found in the culture layer of the ancient
Ust-Poluy sanctuary (first century B.C.) merges the
masterpieces of ancient art with bold ideas and
inspiration of contemporary bone-carving artists.
Medieval bronze and silver casting reflects ancient
culture and beliefs and responds to contemporary
regional and international relations. The research
of the ancient and medieval art of Yamal carried
out by the museum members has allowed
positioning the cultural heritage of Yamal within
the sphere of northern civilization.
The contemporary art of Yamal artists,
notably bone carving, is based on traditional
motifs, traditional crafts and mythology. It aims at
portraying the interrelation and dualism of
humanity and nature, ancient mythology and
contemporary philosophy, laws of humankind and
nature.
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TAKING A STANCE

Traditional and ancient art revival is an part of modern society. Our museum is willing to
essential part of museum activity. Female art of the express its commitment to contribute to creating a
tundra is a specific cultural layer of indigenous worldwide cultural space by adhering to mutual
peoples. interest and respect. We believe it to be the only
way to face contemporary national and
By integrating research centre, laboratory confessional challenges.
and exhibition centre, the museum is capable of
producing human values of a new type, developing
cultural potential of the district in terms of a
contemporary dynamic society. The number of
campaigns devoted to the bone-carving art of the
district can set a perfect example of such
multifunctional activity. They included exhibitions
of ancient and contemporary art, international
conferences, round-table discussions and
workshops that resulted in acknowledging the
Yamal school of bone carving and raising the
artists’ awareness of the deep roots and message of
the art.

The integration of Yamal’s traditions into

Russian and circumpolar cultural heritage was the
result of the museum’s activity directed at the
cultural rebirth of Yamal. At present, work is
underway to establish a permanent exhibition. We
perceive our future exhibition through an
understanding of deep cultural roots of the
indigenous culture, set in a unique northern
environment. We want all the ancient artefacts,
environment, historical monuments and
contemporary exhibits to be embraced in a single
dimension under the motto: ‘Yamal – Land of
Breakthrough’.

We hope that each visitor to the museum

will make a personal breakthrough, for mutual
understanding and co-operation of all peoples of
the North and society at large is an indispensable

106 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
The Multitude of Cultures in the
Museums of Kazan
by Gennadiy Stepanovich Mukhanov and
Gulchachak Rakhimzyanovna Nazipova

Gennadiy Mukhanov is the general director of the National Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan and vice-president of ICOM-Russia. He is the author of many publications in the field
of museology, literature and history, among which we can mention The Chistopol’skiye
Pages (1983).
Gulchachak Nazipova specializes in historical sciences and is currently the deputy director of
the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Kazan is a major economic, administrative,

scientific and cultural centre of the Volga and
Urals region. The specific feature of this region of
Russia is the multi-ethnic structure of its
population. The geopolitical situation has
historically determined the centuries-old
coexistence of Finno-Ugric, Turkic and Slavonic
peoples.

History

Kazan one of the oldest cities of this region, having

celebrated its 1,000-year-old anniversary in 2005.
In the past, Kazan was the administrative centre of
the medieval state of Volga Bulgaria; later, it was a
city of the northernmost nomadic settlement of the
Golden Horde, then the capital city of Kazan
Khanate, a state of eastern Europe. As part of the
Russian Empire, it was the centre of one of its
largest provinces. Now, Kazan is the capital city of
the Republic of Tatarstan. It has for a long period
been the spiritual and cultural centre of a whole
nation – the Tartars. Tartars are scattered
worldwide but are still attracted by their ancient
native land.

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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
TAKING A STANCE

cultural diversity of living cultures. Careful

ª National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan

storage, registration, in-depth study and
popularization of the multi-ethnic cultures are
the most important social functions performed
by the museum.

Collections

The most complete collection of the museum, in

21
quantity and quality, is the Tartar ethnographical
21. The front façade of the National Museum of the Republic of collection. The unique collection of ethnographical
Tatarstan.
articles and crafts, a specially created collection
It is not accidental that Kazan has become of Tartar culture workers’ archives, represents
a large museum centre in Russia. At present, there splendid material on the history and centuries-old
are over 130 different museums here, including culture of the people. The arts of Russians,
fifteen state museums. The city’s historical Chuvashes, Mari, Mordvinians, Udmuts and other
situation has determined the presence of the local regional peoples are represented by valuable
diverse cultures of the regional peoples in these collections of clothes, headwear, utensils, articles
cultural heritage museums. of worship and pictorial and written sources.
There are also antiques collections stored in the
Cultural diversity has thus been the museum that illustrate the cultures of the rest of
determining factor of the museums’ constitution the world: Ancient Greece, Egypt, Asia (India,
since they first appeared in the city at the end of China, Japan) and the countries of Western
the eighteenth century. Museums as such appeared Europe. America is also represented.
at Kazan University, which was founded in 1804.
The work of the university museums prepared the The museum’s exhibitions policy has been
creation in 1895 of the first public Kazan City important in the promotion of the diversity of
industrial-scientific museum, of which the official regional cultures. Arts and Crafts of Kazan Tartars,
successor is the present National Museum of the Monuments of Islamic Art, Tukay and Music,
Tartar Republic. The National Museum of the Museum Rarities for the Kazan Millennium, – these
Republic of Tatarstan, included in the list of the are among the most important exhibition projects
oldest and best-known museums of Russia, is the through which the uniqueness of the cultures of
largest depository of the material and spiritual the republic has been represented.
cultural artefacts of the peoples of the Volga-Urals
region. Having in its collection over 800,000 items, The National Museum of the Republic of
this museum is undoubtedly the leader of museum Tatarstan is at the centre of a broad network of
life in Kazan and in the whole republic. The work eighty-five museums that are voluntary members.
of this museum also most vividly reflects the Ten of them are located in Kazan. The mission of

108 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 The Multitude of Cultures in the Museums of Kazan
Gennadiy Stepanovich Mukhanov and Gulchachak Rakhimzyanovna Nazipova

ª National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan

ª National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan

22 23

22. This bracelet is an example of the major ethnographical 23. Article of worship, the National Museum of the Republic of
collection of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. Tatarstan.

the network is supported by historical clubs and opportunity to present lesser-known regional
public associations. They help in the presentation personalities such as Shigabutdin Mardzhani,
of scientific information on the collections, Kayum Nasyri, Fatikh Amirkhan and Gayaz
benefiting from new information technologies. In Iskhaki.
2001, the National Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan opened the website devoted to the We also use new technologies to promote
Museums of Tatarstan: http://www.tatar. multilingual access to cultural information. In the
museum.ru. Almost all the museums of Kazan are National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan,
presented on this site. scientific summaries are given in Arabic and Tartar
languages. The Tartar language is also presented
A number of monographic memorial in Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Linguistic
museums in Kazan are devoted to Tartar poets, diversity is taken into account for computerization
writers, composers and artists. The most famous of the materials, and specific software has been
ones are the museums of Gabdulla Tukay, Mussa designed to work with all languages used. As a
Dzhalil, Sharif Kamal, Salikh Saidashev, Nazib result, the National Museum of the Republic of
Zhiganov and Baki Urmanche. All these museums Tatarstan has become the first testing ground
can be found on the website. Historical among Russian museums, on which the
personalities, whose stories and lives were linked broadening of translations through automated
to Kazan, are also included in the website’s computerized systems has been tested.
information programme: Peter I and Catherine II,
Pushkin, Lobachevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky and The presentation of cultural diversity
Pasternak among others. The website gives us the through the information space gives an

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TAKING A STANCE

opportunity to make the museums’ multinational,

historical and cultural heritage collections
accessible for the broad mass of Internet users and
also guarantees the safety and transfer of those
collections to future generations.

The interweaving of names and lives, the

interpenetration of different cultures, the support
of old customs and traditions, the pages of
common history – all these themes are presented
together in the museums of Kazan. The majority of
visitors are schoolchildren. The perception of what
is seen and heard is especially acute in childhood;
therefore it is very important to win the hearts of
our young visitors, encouraging them to respect
the historical and cultural monuments of different
nationalities. It is important to help visitors to
realize their public significance, aesthetic value
and, thereby, the necessity to preserve heritages for
future generations.

The display of genuine aspects of past and

present cultures favours the development of
historical thinking, the realization of the
multinational character of the region. It also helps
to combat ethnic prejudices and national nihilism
and teaches understanding and respect for
cultural heritage at large.

110 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)
 ª Marina TAURUS

24

24. Art expressions in the city: Wall painting, Rue du Moulin des Près, Paris. ª «Speedy Graphito», 2005.

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