DC Tries Again

The George Washington University has announced a major gift from Washingtoniana collector Albert Small. Small's collection of rare books, maps, documents, and ephemera comes with a $5 million dollar fund that will be used to create a new museum of Washington history in the 19th-century Woodhull House on the GW campus.In 2003 the Historical Society of Washington DC opened a new City Museum in the old Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Although there was considerable buzz when the museum first opened, it closed a year later due to lack of funds and poor attendance. It has since reopened with a smaller staff and a more limited range of programs and exhibitions. Local history can be complicated in Washington, where the Smithsonian museums, and the federal government in general, loom so large. The needs of tourists, as well as those of transient federal workers, often overshadow the needs of longtime locals. The new Small museum at GW seems to be a more focused project and it has the backing of a major university—hopefully it will fare better than the City Museum, and will provide some meaningful programming to help the residents of DC understand their city.Meanwhile, I'll take this opportunity to point out one thing I love from the DC urban history scene, something that does work for locals. It's the Art on Call project, which restored police and fire call boxes throughout the city, and partnered with contemporary artists to fill them with interesting installations:  (Photos by Nick Eckert © 2009 via Cultural Tourism DC)Each neighborhood chose its own theme for its call boxes, so they really do have a local, community feel. They often allude to nearby historic buildings, or to famous people who lived in the neighborhood. The Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood even has a call box website with images of each box and a map of the box locations. So next time you are in DC put these call boxes at the top of your must-see list. Air & Space Museum can wait.

Where Am I?

I took these photographs on a recent travel excursion. Can you guess where I was?If you guessed somewhere in the UK, you're wrong. I was in Shanghai, China.I was visiting a development called Thames Town, which is part of Shanghai's One City, Nine Towns initiative. One City, Nine Towns is of a series of planned communities around the outskirts of Shanghai, each one designed after a different European architectural style: British, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian. They were meant to echo the international flavor of Shanghai's colonial past, but something happened in the execution.The homes in these new developments reportedly can cost as much as $900,000, a hefty sum made even less attractive by the distance from the city centre. Many units were snatched up by speculators who have failed to find buyers. From what I have read, none of the Nine Towns have reached adequate occupancy levels, and in some cases construction was halted before completion.The result, at least for Thames Town, is something that looks like Disney, or a movie set: buildings that don't look fully real, few signs of everyday living, and storefronts with displays in the window but no actual businesses inside. It's made all the more eery by scores of Chinese wedding couples using the development as the backdrop for their professional photographs. In addition to the red phone booths and the Winston Churchill statue, there's a church and a church green:And tons of mostly British architecture:And a chip shop:And even fake British people:In the face of globalization, I believe each city should preserve and cultivate the cultural elements that make it different from any other city on the planet. We need authentic, unique places---now more than ever. Maybe I'm bringing in my own cultural biases, or maybe Shanghai's identity in the 21st century is in fact something like Disney, but Thames Town feels all wrong to me (even if it was a fascinating way to spend an afternoon).Much has been written about the One City, Nine Towns project. If you find it as fascinating as I do, you should check out this Smithsonian Magazine slide show, this piece from Time, and also this piece from the cultural journal Assembly. If you're really serious you might want to read a new book by urban planner Harry den Hartog, Shanghai New Towns.I was in Shanghai to present a paper at a conference for CAMOC, the city museums committee within the International Council of Museums. In the coming weeks I plan to post several entries chronicling both the conference and my overall experience in Shanghai, but Thames Town was my top posting priority. I hope my photos do it justice.

Mapping Locals and Tourists

I just heard about the work of Eric Fischer, a programmer in the San Francisco area who has created a series of maps of major cities showing where people take photographs. Because the public photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa enable geo-tagging of the images people upload, Fischer was able to create maps that show the hot-spots—the places that are photographed by many people every day. This is interesting for my research because it could help city museums visualize the urban spaces that are most important to the public—the places that possess a high amount of social capital, the ones we want to remember.As if that weren’t enough, Fischer took it one step further and used the timestamps on photos to divide them into those taken by tourists and those taken by locals.  He defines tourists as people who took photos in a given locale for less than a month, and locals as those who log timestamps over many months in the same city. Above is Fischer’s Locals and Tourists map of Boston. Blue represents locals; red represents tourists; yellow represents photos that couldn’t be categorized. Since city museums must be mindful of the different needs of locals and tourists, it’s really interesting to be able to confirm in such graphic terms that the places residents care about are often not the places tourists care about.Here’s the Locals and Tourists map of Helsinki:The first thing I noticed is the prominence of the ferry ride to the island fortress of Suomenlinna. It shows up as a sharp blue line extending from the southeastern edge of Helsinki centre to a blue and red island that looks like a bunch of grapes. The blue line is so defined that you’d think it followed a road, but it’s actually traversing the harbor. And then, of course, you can also see Senate Square and the Esplanade in bright and shining red at the centre, in contrast with the oval blue outline of Toölönlahti, Helsinki's version of Central Park, just to the north. I look at this map and I am proud to say that I have visited just as many blue spots as red. While I am by no means a local yet, I do know something about the Helsinki of Helsinkians.You should all go explore the cities you love through Fischer’s maps—there are hundreds of them. Fischer has made them available in multiple sizes, everything from thumbnail to the original 6137 x 6137 files—just click on the “all sizes” button in the top left corner of each map to access a version with more detail. Isn’t it amazing when information becomes a work of art?