Barca

We hit Barcelona last week. It was a culture shock after Helsinki--loud, huge, hot, a little disordered, and out all night. It smelled differently too: on the streets there was always a faint whiff of frying food, garbage, urine, hot dirt. A few months ago I posted that it took time for me to get adjusted to the smell of Helsinki when I arrived there in March--my nose was off-kilter for the first few weeks. In Barcelona I realized that, having grown up in a warm climate, it was the underlying smell of things baking in the heat--slightly off-putting but nonetheless familiar--that I was missing in Helsinki.The Barcelona city museum is in the old city, in a complex of buildings that includes a medieval palace and church. The lower level has been excavated to reveal the remains of dyeing, fish processing, and wine-making businesses. You can walk around on platforms just above the excavations. I have seen this technique at two other museums: Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal and Aboa Vetus in Turku, Finland.Most of the permanent exhibition at the Barcelona city museum is devoted to early history. The 20th century makes a brief (maybe 30 second) appearance in the introductory video. I saw no mention of Barcelona under Franco--still too raw after 35 years?There was a temporary exhibition on the expansion of Barcelona and the influence of the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà. It was perhaps too academic for a general audience, but there were two meaningful moments that I liked very much. The first was El Cubo Atmosferico (the atmospheric cube). It was a transparent cube that you could walk into, based on the 19th-century urban planning notion that there was a certain volume of clean air every couple needed when they slept each night to renew themselves from the day and to protect themselves from disease. The idea was that every bedroom should be large enough to provide this volume of air. In the midst of such an academic exhibition, being able to inhabit the physical cube was a concrete teaching tool that worked.The second was one of the best museum videos I've ever seen, "Barcelona, Visions de la Primera Metròpoli." The museum commissioned this video from a production company called Nueve Ojos.  Historic photos of Barcelona are animated so that they morph into one another and go from 2D to 3D, seamlessly. You can see a clip from the video on Nueve Ojos's website. Make sure you watch the whole piece because the end is particularly spectacular. If you like this animation style, you should also check out their other project "The Beijing of Lao She."After four hot days we moved on to Paris, which turned out to be no cooler. More to come the next time I have internet access.

Identity Crisis

So far I have mostly been writing about cities with a positive identity—the ones that plenty of people want to visit on vacation, the ones with bright futures. But what about declining cities, nothing-special cities, cities that get picked last at recess? How do history and museums fit into their cultural landscape?I recently read an essay by Sally MacDonald, who worked on a team back in the 1990s to develop a new history museum for Croydon, a borough south of London (“Croydon: What History?” in Making City Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh and Elizabeth Frostick, London: Leicester University Press, 1998, 58-79). MacDonald writes “Anyone reading this who has lived in London or south-east England will probably know what I mean when I say that Croydon has an identity problem. For some time now it has been the butt of jokes, regularly categorized in the press and media as the epitome of boring, faceless, soulless suburbia.” In surveys residents said they weren’t even sure it had any history. In fact, MacDonald’s team had such little faith in Croydon’s image that they actually planned to name the museum “Lifetimes” to prevent any negative associations with the Croydon name (since MacDonald's essay was published it has become the Museum of Croydon). MacDonald saw the new museum as playing a role in changing Croydon’s identity. She goes on to say, “what people and politicians wanted amounted to the same thing. Almost everybody desired a proposal that would put Croydon on the cultural map, though many believed this would be impossible. In order to do this, Croydon’s museum had to be new, different, modern, daring, high profile, glossy, sponsorable, and popular. It would be a symbol to help market Croydon to a hostile outside world.” The museum opened in 1995 and was scheduled for a major retool in 1999. I’m hoping to visit in July and see how it turned out.Back in February before I left the US I had an opportunity to hear Sheila Watson from the University of Leicester speak about her work developing museums for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, UK. A seaside town whose fishing industry collapsed in the 1960s, Great Yarmouth was experiencing high levels of unemployment and accompanying socio-economic problems by the 1990s. After extensive focus groups with residents, Watson worked with the local community on a series of local history initiatives, most notably a new museum about Great Yarmouth’s maritime heritage, Time and Tide, which opened in 2004 and was a finalist for European Museum of the Year in 2006. From the focus groups Watson learned that local residents saw Time and Tide as a vehicle for restoring some pride to Great Yarmouth. In fact, they told Watson’s team the goal should be a museum that would show up the more affluent nearby towns that had better reputations.I don’t believe that a museum can serve as a panacea, magically transforming places like Croydon and Great Yarmouth into somewhere that people want to live or visit. I subscribe to the Project for Public Spaces’ Power of 10 theory that you need 10 great places in a neighborhood, and 10 great neighborhoods in a city, before there’s a there, there. But I do think that a good museum is seen as a symbol of what’s going right in a community while a small-potatoes museum (or no museum at all) is a symbol of all the things that have fallen apart. I also believe that every place has history that matters, and that valuing a place’s history makes a statement that you value its people. Which has me wondering what role Detroit Historical Society is playing in that city’s much-publicized decline. Maybe DHS is just trying to keep its own head above water, but can it find a way to actively contribute to Detroit’s regeneration efforts, or must it settle for merely documenting the loss for posterity?

Accessible Stuff

The photo above is for all my collections manager friends who like to check out other people's work. In March I was lucky enough to get a tour of Helsinki City Museum’s main collections storage facilities from curator Elina Kallio. I couldn’t resist snapping a photo of their old cataloging system. Don’t you just love the hand-drawn pictures? They have card after card like this. Here are some more on the outside of storage boxes:Digital photography sure has changed the day to day work of museums. So have computerized collections databases. Helsinki City Museum is in the process of photographing and computer cataloging their entire collection, but with 300,000 artifacts the work proceeds slowly. Elina estimates that they now have 65,000 records in the database; 40,000 with photographs. Everything else is still accessed the old way, by card catalog. As for the photograph collection, about 40,000 of 1 million prints/negatives have been digitally scanned.Having a key-word searchable catalog record and digital image of every piece in the collection will make it exponentially easier for the staff at Helsinki City Museum to research and use their artifacts. But projects like this one will have an effect on other city museums as well. Eventually, along with museum collections across the globe, the Helsinki artifacts will go online. Then it will be much easier for other city museums to compare their material culture to Helsinki’s, identifying both commonalities and areas of distinction.City museums are pretty good at analyzing and understanding how their city fits into the history and culture of its region or country. They are less good at comparing themselves to cities in other places. Globalization may call for more and more of such cross-cultural investigation in the coming years. It will be helpful to be able to use the artifacts as a jumping-off point, especially since Google Translate is making it easier for us to understand catalog records in other languages. So Elina, you don’t mind finishing the other 235,000 records this summer, do you? Look at it this way: at least you don’t have to draw each object by hand…

House Calls

Continuing on the topic of history-themed contemporary art, on Sunday I checked out a project called Encounters at the Helsinki City Museum’s main building on Sofianinkatu. For this project, the museum hosted a group of students from Aalto University who are taking a class called Museums as Artistic Medium. It’s taught by the artist Outi Turpeinen, whose work often centers on issues of museum display. The students created artistic interventions that were sprinkled throughout the city museum’s galleries, in and around the permanent exhibition Helsinki Horizons, during the month of May.Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of the students’ work—I forgot my camera that day and now the show has closed. But I want to tell you about one piece that got me thinking. This particular student had gone out across Helsinki, in different neighborhoods, and knocked on doors at random. If someone answered she would ask for an object to be donated to her display at the museum. About 20 of these objects were then exhibited as part of Encounters. Accompanying text listed the neighborhood and a few sentences about the donor, the meaning of the object, and why it was chosen. Objects ranged from a broken cell phone, to old cut nails found during renovation work, to a custom shot glass made by the owner’s husband (he had worked in the Arabia factory). From the text you could tell that these folks probably felt a little put on the spot—some of them chose the first thing they could get their hands on, or pieces that clearly held little value for them (a bottle of cologne bought for a husband who turned out to be allergic to it, for example). But others were thoughtful about their choice and told stories of personal significance.Which got me thinking. Lots of museums have started community collecting initiatives, putting calls out to residents to donate artifacts that fill gaps in the existing collection. And there have also been intensive neighborhood documentation efforts. Helsinki City Museum, for example, has initiated several projects to document specific areas of the city—in the 1970s the Pasila neighborhood and also Vaasankatu and Museokatu Streets, and then more recently Myllypuro. These HCM projects focused on architectural and photo documentation as well as interviews. Some artifacts were acquired too, on a lesser scale.But has anyone ever tried to take a material culture census, so to speak? Door-to-door collecting, literally an object for every household? Not that I know of. And would it work?These days museums try to be very selective with the artifacts they acquire. Once you formally take something into the collection you have to care for it forever. Although photographs and oral histories have their own preservation needs, three-dimensional artifacts are a particularly heavy drain on resources. And there’s also a valid argument that not everything is worth preserving—some objects just don’t stand the test of time. Therefore museums are very careful to retain their right to turn down a donation. Plus, working with so many individual families—to build up trust, to determine the most suitable object (you wouldn’t want them to choose on the spot as described above), to fully document each artifact—would be daunting. In fact I can hear curators all over Europe and North America sighing with exhaustion just from reading this.But on the other hand, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might make museums more inclusive. If it truly were every household, a material culture census would create a direct, 1 to 1 ratio between the city museum and the community it claims to represent. It might make a strong statement that every life has value; we are all part of history. Maybe it takes working that hard to put history at the center of community life. There’s also something special about doing it with objects—both their tangible nature and their symbolic meaning.And to what end? Would it be worth all that work? Would it simply create a lot of white noise? I can envision some people deriving a profound satisfaction from the cultural acknowledgment of seeing their entire community in the museum, and the “everyone included” approach opening the door for a new kind of public history. I can envision a lot of people not caring. I can envision a really interesting conversation about the role of museums in 21st century society. I can envision wrangling over ownership and privacy rights. I can envision some powerful artifacts and stories that otherwise would never make it into the historical record. I can envision a lot of junk taking up space in museum warehouses. I can envision historians a hundred years from now being so thankful they have such a sweeping body of material to work with. I can envision it requiring a completely different skillset than what today’s curators are trained for. I want to try it anyway and see what happens.

Geo-tagging Is the New Black

The Museum of London just launched an IPhone app that allows users to pull up geo-tagged photos and paintings all over the city, similar to the Sydney Powerhouse Museum project I described a few weeks ago.There are a few more images of StreetMuseum available at Londonist to give you a sense of how it might work. The launch of StreetMuseum is part of the fanfare for the Museum of London’s new Galleries of Modern London, a £20 million undertaking that opens May 28. Museum of London is considered to be one of the leaders in the city museum field, so I am very interested to check out this new project when I travel to London in July. In the meantime, here’s an early review from the Times.

The Common Folk

The Helsinki City Museum operates a Worker Housing Museum. It opened for the season on May 5, so yesterday I went to check it out with a Finnish friend who lives nearby. It’s in Kallio, a working-class neighborhood just to the north of Helsinki Centre.The museum is part of a block of four buildings with a central courtyard, built by the City of Helsinki to house city workers. Visitors can step inside nine one-room apartments, each furnished to represent a different time period from 1910 to 1985. Here’s an apartment that housed a widow and her seven children, in 1925:HCM researched the families that actually lived in these “stove rooms,” and their stories are presented both by a museum guide who accompanies you through the building and in panels on the door of each apartment. A tenth “hands-on” apartment contains furnishings that kids can try out for themselves:You even get to see the toilets, in the basement (they were hooked up to the city sewer system in the 1940s):Jari Karhu, head of visitor services for the Helsinki City Museum, tells me that the Worker Housing Museum does not get a lot of visitor traffic—about 7,000 people during the 2009 summer season. But those who do make a special trip to Kallio give the museum higher than average marks in visitor satisfaction surveys: 88% rank it a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.The interpretation is quite effective, and I was of course immediately reminded of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. The Tenement Museum is much-lauded as one of the more innovative and successful museums in the U.S., and it’s also one of my personal favorites. The experience there is more immersive than Helsinki’s Worker Housing Museum but the two operate in a similar vein. Since Americans tend to think that we are the center of the universe, and since the Tenement Museum is so well-known in the museum field, I assumed it served as a model for what I saw yesterday. But it turns out the Worker Housing Museum opened in 1989, a full three years before the Tenement Museum started showing its first restored apartment. That’ll teach me.For much of the 20th century the typical historic house museum provided visitors with a window into the lifestyles of the rich and famous: fancy mansions, fancy furniture, fancy clothes, fancy parties. But that’s not how most of us have lived—historically or today. The Worker Housing Museum and the Tenement Museum are part of a movement to democratize history by interpreting the lives of ordinary people. First, the idea is that all history matters. But it’s also that, instead of expecting visitors to live vicariously through upper-class history that only represents a tiny fraction of the population, museums of everyday or working-class life build a more direct—and therefore more powerful—link with the past by presenting historical characters that visitors can actually relate to: the common folk. Countless visitors make connections between their tour of the Tenement Museum and their own family’s immigrant story. And indeed, a similar connection happened when I was at the Worker Housing Museum: Ulla, my Finnish friend, saw a cupboard in the 1940s apartment that was like one in her parents’ home. She was struck by it, and took care to explain to me its special pull-out board for kneading bread.The Helsinki City Museum’s commitment to interpreting the everyday life of ordinary Helsinkians doesn’t stop with the Worker Housing Museum. In my conversations with the HCM staff, it’s a theme that has come up again and again as their highest priority. For instance, when Elina Kallio, curator of collections, gave me a tour of HCM’s two collections storage centers, we saw example after example of commonplace items. Elina talked about wanting to collect objects that evoke the kind of sense memory Ulla had—objects from your grandparents’ home, or your working experience, or from popular culture. Many city museums have good intentions when it comes to interpreting everyday life, but they don’t have the artifacts to support such an approach; their collections were built at the turn of the 20th century, when historical institutions typically only cared about preserving the history of privilege. That’s why it’s so important that HCM is making a concerted effort to comprehensively collect the everyday experience of Helsinki. This is a resource-intensive process, but it is HCM’s way forward nonetheless.A few days after my tour with Elina I had a similar conversation with exhibition curator Jari Harju. We talked about projects they’ve undertaken to document everyday life in Helsinki’s neighborhoods, including one in Myllypuro, on the northeastern side of the city, that involved artifact acquisitions, photo-documentation, and interviews with residents (museum director Tiina Merisalo wrote an essay about the Myllypuro project for the publication City Museums as Centres of Civic Dialogue that you can download but keep in mind that it’s a 226-page PDF). In addition, right now Jari is working on a project to document poverty in Helsinki. It’s part of a collaboration with the Luxembourg City Museum and Minnesota Historical Society, among others. Many city museums still pretty much ignore their poorest residents, so this project is ahead of the curve.I think one of the major reasons that in the 20th century city museums failed to establish a place for themselves at the very center of urban life is because their version of history only took into account a narrow slice of the cities they claimed to collect, preserve, and interpret. As Tiina Merisalo asks in her essay about Myllypuro, “Whose image of the past is the museum reflecting and shaping? Whose city are we representing?” Like the Helsinki City Museum, many of these institutions realized the imperative for a more inclusive version of history as the 20th century was drawing to a close. Which leads me to three final comments.First, walking the walk is a lot harder than talking the talk when it comes to representing everyday life, particularly when it involves the aforementioned resource-intensive collecting initiatives. So I’m impressed by the progress Helsinki City Museum has made but also concerned about how smaller city museums will manage to do the same, practically speaking, even if it is indeed the way forward.Second, one of the reasons the Worker Housing Museum and the Tenement Museum are so striking is because the experience is intensely urban. Space is at a premium and thin walls separate neighboring families who constantly negotiate shared stairwells, courtyards, and toilets. So it’s not just the stuff of everyday life in the city but also the way one lives, with unpredictable situations and less personal space. Capturing this essential urban-ness—what makes city life different from life outside of cities—is an interesting challenge for 21st-century city museums.And third, one of the reasons the Worker Housing Museum is such a special place is because the opportunity to step inside a one-room apartment that housed five people is rare and therefore memorable—if it were as ubiquitous as the typical upper-class historic house museum then we might get bored. Therefore, this is not a prescription for every city museum to create its own working class housing site and then call it a day. Each city museum needs to find its own creative, fascinating, and unique ways to use the everyday history it collects.This post has gone on and on. I haven’t even touched on issues of ethnicity, which is tangled up with class in most cities (and yet in completely different ways here in Finland). I also haven’t discussed the difference between 20th-century history—the recent past—and, say, 17th-century history—the truly dead past. These are both important related topics but they will have to wait for another day.In the meantime, the Worker Housing Museum, combined with the homemade blueberry tart Ulla served afterward, made for an excellent Sunday afternoon. I highly recommend them both the next time you are in Helsinki.

Thinking the Present Historically

Another essay in City Museums and City Development is written by two curators from the Museum of Sydney, Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Susan Hunt. Their approach to interpreting Sydney is something they call “thinking the present historically.” The museum staff uses the past to inform the present experience of Sydney residents, with particular attention to contemporary social and political issues and to the city’s ethnic diversity. Therefore the goal is not simply to illuminate Sydney’s history, but to make a statement or ask a question that is relevant and useful to today’s Sydneysiders.While some of the content developed by the Museum of Sydney does focus on traditional historical themes (for example, a current exhibition, 1810: Expanding Sydney, describes Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s influence on the city in the early 19th century), the staff is just as likely to produce exhibitions and programming about Sydney now, with little overt reference to history.An exhibition titled My City of Sydney (2004-2006) explored the question of what makes Sydney, Sydney. It involved a documentary film, commissioned by the museum, in which Sydney residents “tell personal stories of places significant to them” (p.79), as a well as several installations by contemporary Sydney artists (one featured residents’ home movies; another is described as “a family photo album of a city”).Meanwhile, a series of symposiums over the last ten years addressing a range of contemporary issues—from urban redevelopment and sustainability to demographic shifts to the Olympics—have resulted in two major publications: Debating the City: An Anthology (2001) and Talking about Sydney: Population, Community, and Culture in Contemporary Sydney (2006)Another exhibition, Sydney Now (2007-2008), presented the work of 24 contemporary photojournalists, portraying the “everyday lives of ordinary citizens.” A user-generated component to the exhibition, My Sydney Now, invited members of the public to submit a photograph that “best captured life in Sydney” via Flckr. A panel of judges then chose three of these images to be included alongside the work of the professional photojournalists in the bricks-and-mortar exhibition.Indeed, the Museum of Sydney collaborates frequently with contemporary artists, particularly photographers. The 2003 exhibition Welcome to Sydney featured panoramic portrait photographs by Anne Zahalka of Sydneysiders from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, each one shot in a different location throughout the city. The exhibition attempted to spark dialogue about diversity and identity amidst “the recent climate of intense controversy over Australia’s immigration policies and treatment of refugees.” (p. 79) For another project, Eora Crossing, the museum worked with the “physical theatre” company Legs on the Wall to create an outdoor performance piece than ran for three nights during Sydney Festival 2004. Part indigenous dance, part storytelling, and part acrobatics, the piece involved dancers hanging by rigging from the skyscrapers of downtown Sydney with the museum building, which stands on the site of the first colonial Government House, serving as the centerpiece. In a city still dealing with the legacy of colonialism, Eora Crossing addressed what white occupation meant for Sydney’s indigenous Cadigal people.I must confess I have never been to Australia, so I am learning about the Museum of Sydney second-hand. But here are some thoughts after a few hours studying archived material online. First, after working for so long in a city where public history is fixated on the 18th century, the idea of interpreting the present is refreshing, maybe even downright liberating. I got excited by some of these projects; if I lived in Sydney I’d want to see them all. But I’m not the typical visitor, so of course my question is whether or not this approach leads to a more successful visitor experience or a more engaged public. The museum’s annual visitation (paid admission plus comp tickets and public program attendance) averages a little shy of 100,000 from 2004 to 2008. This is certainly respectable but not stellar. I’m thinking about other ways to measure. In the meantime, this concept makes sense intuitively to me—after all, how often have museums been admonished to use visitors’ own experience as a point of departure, instead of starting with something abstract or remote? For a history museum, what could be closer to visitors’ own experience than the present?Second, working with contemporary artists could be a particularly useful approach for city museums that don’t have strong collections. History museums usually rely on their collections to do the heavy lifting, and rightfully so. But in today’s market the development of a comprehensive collection can be cost-prohibitive. For city museums that are just starting out—or for those that never acquired vast stores of artifacts in the first place—providing venues for artists to make statements about the city, if done thoughtfully, could be just as powerful and authentic.And third, I wish I had been there to watch those dancers hanging from the sky. What an interesting example of place-specific programming, not to mention public spectacle. I’m sure there are thousands of Sydneysiders out there who can’t walk by the museum building without thinking of it. Metrics be damned, I have to believe that experiences like this one knit us together as part of a shared urban community, even if the stitches are loose and uneven. The strange and unexpected, shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of strangers—that’s what city life is all about.

History Repeating Itself, Part 2

Here’s something I’ve been seeing a lot of in city museums: street signs in the lobby. I took this photo at the Museum of London in February:

Museum of London, Street Signs in Lobby

Museum of London, Street Signs in Lobby

And here’s one from the Chicago History Museum:

Chicago History Center, Street Signs in Lobby

Chicago History Center, Street Signs in Lobby

And the Centre d'Histoire de Montréal; not quite the lobby but just off it, at the start of the permanent exhibition:

Centre d'Histoire de Montreal

Centre d'Histoire de Montreal

I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad idea, mind you. Street signs can be very evocative, particularly when they are from streets we have walked a thousand times. But have city museums become formulaic? And would it be more effective to bring the museum to the streets, instead of the other way around?

LAYARing History

Earlier this week I blogged about my interest in combining GPS and city history.  A colleague recently sent me a link to a project launched by the Powerhouse, Sydney’s  museum of science and design. Today I had a chance to sit down and explore. It uses Layar, an augmented reality tool. If you’re saying to yourself, “Hunh?” then here’s what it means. If you have an IPhone or an Android phone, Layar registers your location and will pull up GPS-encoded information—for example, the closest café, any public events currently taking place, nearby “Tweeters”—as you walk around. In other words it augments your experience of a real place. The Powerhouse has loaded historic photographs of Sydney into Layar. The photos are geo-tagged with coordinates as close as possible to the photographer’s original viewpoint. That means you can pull out your phone in the central business district and pull up what Sydney would have looked like from that same spot in, say, 1926. Layar is still a relatively new tool for museums. The Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s contemporary art museum, offers a Layar opportunity for users to design their own public art and install it virtually on the streets of the city. And two developers in Germany have created a virtual version of the Berlin Wall, where the real wall used to stand, raising all sorts of implications for city museums (imagine using Layar to remake all our bulldozed landmarks). Other museums are using different augmented reality tools besides Layar within the bricks-and-mortar exhibition space (examples include the “Mobile Augmented Reality Quest,” the Allard Pierson Museum, and the Louvre). This is interesting stuff. I caution that technology for technology’s sake is never a good idea. And it’s going to take years for the small museums to get around to such projects—they’re still struggling to pay the electricity bill. But let’s at least spend a little time dreaming about the possibilities. For example, historic sites face significant physical challenges because proper preservation requires so many restrictions. Why not use augmented reality to recreate for visitors what a particular historic space looked like, without having to make any real changes to walls, floors, and furnishings? Or why not have residents create their own mental maps in Layar of their most important urban places? And speaking of layered history, with an e this time, why not use augmented reality to show a street corner in Sydney not just in 1926, but from prehistory up through present day? The past is present, indeed.

Here's Something I Love

In 2007 the Helsinki City Museum published a comic book detailing its archaeological research in downtown Helsinki. The book was so successful that last year the museum was able to publish a version in English, which thankfully means I had a chance to read it myself. It's called Digging Around in Helsinki's Past and I love it. So do all the Americans who have come to visit me—they keep on picking it up off the coffee table in my apartment.

Digging Around In Helsinkis Past.jpg

Not only does it describe various archaeological digs around the city and what they have uncovered about 17th and 18th-century life, it also explains how archaeologists do their work. The idea for the book was more or less organic. The museum happened to have on its staff an archaeologist, Jaana Mellanen, who is also a cartoonist. She did a few cartoons in the museum newsletter and they were well-received. So they put her to work. The result is informative, easy to understand, visually rich, and even funny at times. It’s a great example of public history because it distills a rather complex topic into something a lay person can understand, without losing all the interesting details. Bravo to HCM for taking a creative risk, and for recognizing Mellanen’s talents, even if they fell quite far outside her job description.

City Museums in the 21st Century

There’s a new collection of essays about city museums that just came out in paperback: City Museums and City Development, ed. by Ian Jones, Robert R. Macdonald, and Darryl McIntyre (AltaMira Press, 2010). In the coming weeks I intend to blog about several of these essays. Let’s start today with a statement made by Chet Orloff in “Museums of Cities and the Future of Cities.” Orloff is a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University in Oregon, and from 1991-2001 was the director of the Oregon Historical Society. In his essay he writes:

The nineteenth century was, broadly speaking, the century of the history and the natural history museum, an era of exploration and a fitting time for the growth and popularity of ‘cabinets of curiosities.’ The twentieth century was very much the century of the art museum, a time of building deep collections and great buildings, with far-ranging advances in the visual arts. The twenty-first century—when cities will be, even more, the places where people live and where so much will happen—ought to be the moment of the city museum. (p.27)

Alexanderplatz Exhibition

Alexanderplatz Exhibition

In 2007 it was widely reported that the world was on the verge of a population shift, where for the first time half the global population would be living in cities. Indeed, by 2030 it is predicted that nearly two thirds of the global population will be urban. Several essays in City Museums and City Development refer to this shift, and it seems to be on the minds of many city museum professionals as they envision the future of their work. Orloff, in the above quote, is calling for city museums to take the opportunity presented by 21st-century global urbanization to position themselves at the very center of their communities: “not merely to collect and share historical knowledge, but to help change and shape the lives of our cities and their citizens.” (p.29) He thinks city museums can transform themselves by creating global collaborations with their sister museums in other cities, by participating more fully in the urban planning process in their cities, and by bringing history out onto the streets. My first reaction when I read this essay was to think yeah, whatever. I’ve heard this kind of talk before, and yet city museums still continue to suffer from poor visitation relative to their sister art museums, persistent funding problems, the public perception of history as bitter-tasting medicine, and the lack of a concrete, achievable plan as to how they can get from where they are now to that place at the center of their communities. But I’m trying to give Orloff the benefit of the doubt and think a little harder about it. And so I’m wondering if what might save us, what could possibly make city museums the darlings of the 21st century, is Orloff’s call for us to take to the streets, coupled with an emerging technological tool: GPS. History can be so place-based. Over the years I’ve watched thousands of museum visitors become enthralled with the prospect of “standing in the spot” where some significant historical event happened, or where some significant historical figure lived and worked. But for years, city museums have been in the business of gathering up artifacts and stories from all over the city and consolidating them in one building, in most cases severed from their original historical places. Which leads me to a great quote from another essay in this book, Jack Lohman’s “The Prospect of a City Museum:” “Why is it that city museums often seem as if the city had departed?” (p.61) In other words, in the process of rounding everything up and organizing it in glass cases in ritualized galleries, city museums often lose a lot of the energy, complexity, and constant change that makes us love cities so much in the first place; they lose the city itself. The recent pervasiveness of GPS technology may present a new opportunity for us to send history back out into the city, out into the energy of the streets, creating moments of “standing in the spot” on every corner. People have been talking about “museums without walls” for years, but this would be slightly different, and possibly more powerful. It would mean reconnecting all those severed links between history and place, and helping the public see the layers of history hidden underneath the present-day city. For example, as I envisioned in my Friendville post , we could program mobile devices to call up historical views of the city—photos or paintings—as you walk past their vantage points in the modern city. And in Boston over the past few years I’ve been working on a project for the Bostonian Society that involves mapping all the people, places, and events from Revolutionary Boston, both online and in an IPhone application, so that we can expand past the traditional notion of the Freedom Trail to interpret 18th-century Boston with much more complexity, all over downtown. In addition, while I was in Berlin in March, I noticed that an open-air exhibition at Alexanderplatz about political protest and the fall of the Wall included artifacts, in special outdoor cases. While the collections manager in me wants to be very careful not to damage precious artifacts by subjecting them to bright sunlight, security risks, and extreme changes in climate, maybe our exhibition case technology has advanced far enough that putting large numbers of objects out on the streets is not such a far-fetched idea. At the very least, we could add a GPS coordinate field to our new online collections databases. All of this GPS work takes a lot of time and money. But maybe it’s a compelling enough idea to fuel Orloff’s vision of the 21st-century city museum. We’ve got 90 years left to prove him right or wrong. Let’s get to work.

Friendville City Museum

This post may leave me open for a lot of ribbing because it will sound so dorky, but I’m going to do it anyway. About ten years ago, my college mates and I came up with a concept that to us is quite sticky. It’s called Friendville, and it’s the imaginary city of our dreams. Friendville is exactly an hour from every place we care about: the mountains, the sea, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Barcelona—you get the idea. Moreover, every person we care about lives there (or at least keeps a pied à terre). And our families are as close—or as far—as each of us wants them to be. That amazing Vietnamese noodle shop in Minneapolis? It’s there. So is the yummy brunch spot from Providence, and the hole-in-the-wall Atlanta BBQ joint. Friendville has a whole slew of jobs in each of our chosen fields, no matter how obscure they are. And there’s something new to discover—an interesting building, a flea market, a park with giant old trees, a public concert—around every corner. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to imagine city history in Friendville. It goes without saying that there must be an excellent city museum, where I am in charge, with an endowment of 80 gazillion-jillion USD. But if I could create a city where history truly mattered, what would it look like, in everyday practice? Here are some of my ideas:

  • Whenever you move into a new home or apartment in Friendville, along with the keys you receive a detailed history of the place—who lived there before you, how the building has changed over time, and historic photos of your block.

  • Once a year, the city museum holds a “Documenting Friendville” day. Residents are encouraged to submit their photographs and artwork, diary entries and oral histories, and artifacts and ephemera representing everyday life in Friendville to be added to the museum’s collection. Each year the date is different to reflect the changing seasons and other calendar variations. (This concept is borrowed from the local historian Carol Kammen and others.)

  • The city museum also has been actively documenting residents’ mental maps of Friendville for several decades. At first these maps were drawn by hand by residents, sometimes individually and sometimes as a community-wide event. Now they are also collected online, so that patterns can be tracked more easily. Its mental map collection helps the city museum cultivate a deeper understanding of places in the city—not just landmarks and grand civic spaces, but also nooks and crannies off the beaten path—that hold meaning for residents, and how these places, and their meanings, have changed over time.

  • One of the local arthouse cinemas (there are five, you know) plays old historical footage and documentaries of Friendville, continuously throughout the day. Residents can submit their own home movies and other found footage to be added to the loop. (And this one is borrowed from the Helsinki City Museum, which collaborates with Cinema Engel, next door).

  • There is a lot of great public art, with an historical theme, throughout Friendville (more on this subject in later posts).

  • All over Friendville there are spots where the GPS on your IPhone (all Friendville residents have IPhones) triggers an historic view of Friendville—photo or painting—to pop up on your screen. The IPhone app helps you position yourself so that you have the same vantage point as the historic view, to compare “then and now” seamlessly.

  • Deep-set windows are quite common in Friendville townhouses—it’s part of the local architectural style. Over the last few years a tradition has developed: with the help of Friendville City Museum staff, residents living on the ground floor stage mini historical tableaus in their window wells to delight and entertain passersby.

  • The city museum is working with the local schools to create an intensive “Special Places” curriculum. This curriculum teaches students a range of skills for understanding the power of place—mapping, direct observation, storytelling, photography, historical research, preservation.

Hopefully this vision of Friendville helps you understand my values when it comes to city history. I want city history to be creative, personal, and visual; to invite a high degree of participation from local residents; to permeate our everyday experience. I want to cultivate “place literacy” and experiment with the hyper-local. I want to find a way to make city history matter so much that Friendville’s residents truly believe the city museum has earned its $80 gazillion-jillion endowment. Pipe dream? Who knows. There are tiny bits of Friendville happening right now in cities all over the world. But how about you? What’s your vision of history in Friendville? (Or just Friendville in general; I could talk about its restaurants alone until the cows come home…)

History Repeating Itself, Part 1

It will come as no surprise that I’ve visited a lot of city museums lately, both in the US and in Europe. Patterns are emerging. Today I want to discuss one in particular: the permanent city history exhibition. Almost every city museum has one, and they are remarkably similar. They are almost always chronological in nature, starting with prehistory and native communities, and winding up somewhere around 2000. The following topics are covered, more or less in the following order:

  • Colonization

  • Early development and trade

  • [Insert fire/flood/famine here]

  • [Insert war here]

  • Industrial revolution

  • Transportation

  • [More war and disaster]

  • Immigration

  • Labor issues and social ills (at this point we’re somewhere in the late 19th century)

  • Modernization

  • [More war]

  • Famous local products and people

  • The time we hosted the World’s Fair/Olympics

  • New Immigration and ethnic diversity

  • Hooray for our city!

Such treatments of city history, on one hand, are admirable. On some level, every member of the general public should have a basic grounding in the sweep of history over time, and in the forces that shaped each of these cities from nothing more than a defensible position near a developing trade route, to modern metropolises. I’m all for an educated citizenry. But I see so many visitors with their eyes glazed over as they try to make it through case after case of the same old story, and I’m not sure how much knowledge they walk away with in the end. I’m interested in whether there might be a different approach. I wonder if the chronologically organized, permanent city history exhibition is even necessary (maybe it is—I’d like to hear arguments for and against). It seems to me that perhaps what’s most interesting to visitors is not what a particular city has in common with every other city in North America and Europe, but instead, what sets it apart. At the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, I really liked a brief audio piece on Pittsburgh accents. At the McCord Museum, in the Simply Montreal exhibition, there was a creative display about Montreal’s extreme winter climate, with historical artifacts ranging from snow shoes, to fur hats, to bed warmers. Not to be outdone, the Helsinki City Museum currently has on display at the Sederholm House an entire temporary exhibition about night in Helsinki, so fitting for a city that spends months every year in darkness. So again I ask, is the chronologically organized, permanent city history exhibition necessary? Is it a core duty and responsibility of city museums? If it’s necessary, is there a way to make it more interesting, and more digestible? If it’s not necessary, then what can we replace it with?