Walking the Talk

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of exploring cities at a pedestrian’s pace and scale. You pick up details that could easily be missed in a car or train, and repeated walks over the same ground create layers of experience, a sense of change over time. Walking tours of cities or neighborhoods are nothing new; they’ve been around for years. But I’m starting to collect examples of tours that go beyond the typical expert-walks-you-around-and-points-out-sites-of-interest, or you-walk-yourself-around-and-read-said-expert’s-text.One I encountered recently is a self-guided, oral history tour of Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood called Speaking of Wickenden. It was created by students in Anne Valk’s Community and Documentary Storytelling course at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities. At each stop, instead of commentary from the traditional expert guide, you hear oral histories by longtime residents of Fox Point (historically it was a mostly Portuguese, Cape Verdean, and Irish working-class neighborhood) that were recorded and edited by the Brown students. I’m sure Speaking of Wickenden isn’t the first oral history cell phone tour, but it’s a nice example, nonetheless.The first time I heard this tour I was reminded that no public history project can be successful without great content—you either have it or you don’t. And these oral histories are great content, primary source content. I’ve posted before about online historic photograph projects like Historypin and SepiaTown. I would love it if these sites mapped oral history content as well. There are a few projects doing it in small doses—PhilaPlace and City of Memory are two. But it’s too bad that something as massive as the StoryCorps archive isn’t geo-tagged online. Meanwhile, you can listen to Speaking of Wickenden audio stops on the Internet, even if you’re not in Providence. Here’s hoping the students expand their scope to other neighborhoods.

The God of the City

When I was in China last month I spent a day in Hangzhou, a city of 7 million a few hours southwest of Shanghai. Like most Chinese cities, it has a temple for the god of the city. These gods serve as the spiritual counterpart to living local officials, protect their cities from all manor of problems (wars, natural disasters, crop failures), and also address the individual needs of residents.Hangzhou's current city god temple is not very old; it was built in the 1990s. But nonetheless it is beautiful, and well-sited. Surrounded by trees, it sits on Wu Hill, not far from the Hangzhou Museum, looking out at the entire city. Here's the view from the temple toward West Lake:And the view looking east, toward Hangzhou's business district:I'm not very religious, but the city god is a concept I can get behind. I'm thinking of America's Rust Belt cities, struggling to reinvent themselves given new post-industrial realities. Or Washington, DC, which so often gets swallowed up by the federal government. Or New Orleans. These places could all use a god just for them, to give an extra push where us mere mortals fail.Or a super-hero. Or a fairy god-mother. I'm not picky.

I Want to Go to There

I'm a fan of the urban planner Charles Landry and his concept of the creative city. I just started his book The Art of City Making and came across this passage:

Our sensory landscape is shrinking precisely at the moment when it should be broadening. Sensory manipulation is distancing us from our cities and we are losing our visceral knowledge of them. We have forgotten how to understand the smells of the city, to listen to its noises, to grasp the messages its look sends out and to be aware of its materials.

I was reminded of Landry when I came across a link to a contemporary art exhibition currently showing at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in NYC. It's called You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City. According to the Pratt Manhattan website, the exhibition includes:

  • a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickokan
  • an anxiety map of the five boroughs lit by sweat-powered batteries by Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson
  • a “Loneliness Map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
  • a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
  • a cemetery map of Polish ancestors’ graves by Kim Baranowski
  • an installation constructed from city ephemera by Pratt faculty member Robbin Ami Silverberg
  • personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association including works by Tony Dowler, Will Haughery, Janine Nichols, Yumi Roth, Gowri Savoor, Rob Servo, Krista Shaffer, Kees Touw, Dean Valadez, and Shane Watt
  • a series of mapped reflections on the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the ascendancy of the rock dove by Miranda Mahera
  • a New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
  • photographs of a buzzing honeycomb map created by Liz Scranton’s bees
  • the preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post 9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city
  • Nina Katchadourian’s New York soundtrack, assembled from found segments of cassette tape
  • Jeff Sisson’s ongoing Bodega List project
  • a Happiness Map by Jane Hammond
  • Bill Rankin’s maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
  • a diptych of memory maps by Dahlia Elsayed

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking this exhibition is probably chock-a-block with sensory experience. I can't make it to New York before the exhibition closes on November 6, but I'm hoping an NY reader might check it out and report back. Do you come away with a deeper, more visceral understanding of the city? And which pieces are most successful? In the meantime, the rest of you can find more description and some photographs at UrbanOmnibus.

We Are What We Remember

I finally had a chance to try out Historypin, the website that lets you link old photos to Google Street View. Historypin was developed, in partnership with Google, by We Are What We Do, an organization in the UK that takes big goals like a cleaner environment or better schools and breaks them into small, manageable steps they call "actions." Historypin represents action #132, Share a Piece of Your History, as part of a goal of strengthening intergenerational relationships.I was home in North Carolina this week for my 20th high school reunion, so I rooted through my childhood photo album and found an image that seemed perfect for Historypin:It's the house I grew up in, just after an ice storm in 1979. The house was torn down in 1984 to make way for a baseball stadium, so the site looks radically different today. I was able to successfully pin the photo to Street View and upload a brief story about the house. You can view the results here.Historypin debuted in June 2010 and it's still in beta form. In theory, linking historical images to Google Street View creates compelling before-and-after comparisons, and I like the idea that anyone, anywhere can upload to the same global map. But in practice, Historypin is still a clunky experience.First, the user interface is complicated and not intuitive for a general audience. The layout of the page is confusing and it's not always clear which button to click to navigate between Google map, Google Street View, and the specific information about each image--you can easily end up somewhere you didn't intend to be. Plus, the Street View function, by far the most interesting part of the site, doesn't always work properly. When people pin their old photos to Street View, the scale or angle is often skewed. It's hard to get a crisp comparison, to toggle back and forth between old and new, or to zoom out far enough from the image to get the overall effect.Second, the map still needs to be saturated with a lot more images. So far, mine is the only one pinned to Greensboro, North Carolina, a sizable city. I can imagine that many of the photos that would be most interesting for Street View--the ones that are at least 20 years old and therefore show significant change--have not yet been scanned into digital format; they are in closets and attics and basements all over the place. Historypin will be much more meaningful if everyone uses it. Seeding the content is a challenge for many online projects, not just Historypin.And third, copyright restrictions present a barrier. You're only allowed to upload photos for which you own the rights, which is how I ended up rooting through the photo album at my mom's house. Again, the most interesting photographs are the older ones, most of which are owned by historical societies and libraries. Historypin is encouraging these organizations to add their fabulous photograph collections to the map, and a few are doing so. Meanwhile, I imagine there are some local history enthusiasts out there who would spend countless hours researching, uploading, and pinning images if access and permission could be brokered.I hope after some retooling that Historypin succeeds, and eventually launches a mobile app version. In the meantime, did my test case strengthen any intergenerational relationships? I spent an hour talking to my mom about the old house--she remembered details that I had forgotten, and we debated the height of the magnolia trees and what kind of story I should write. Later my sister came over and added her two cents. We are all walking around today with vivid memories of a place we shared that no longer exists. Action #132: check.

Soul Landscapes

A few weeks before I left Helsinki in June the director of the Helsinki City Museum, Tiina Merisalo, invited my husband and me over for dinner. In the middle of new potatoes and salmon smoked by her husband Matti, the subject of “soul landscapes” came up. This concept was new to me, but as Tiina explains it, your soul landscape is the one that hits you in the center of your chest, they one you always carry with you, the one that immediately feels like home. It is often the landscape of your childhood, but it doesn’t have to be.Tiina’s family is from Oulu, on the western coast of Finland. She says her soul landscape is the sea at Oulu. Her husband Matti grew up in East Helsinki and has never lived anywhere else. This is his soul landscape—you can see it in his eyes when he talks about his neighborhood. For my husband Graham it’s the wooded lakes of New England, for which he found an excellent Finnish substitute, Kuusijarvi, a short bus ride from Helsinki centre:And me? Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a song that describes my soul landscape perfectly, called I Am a Town. It's the rural American south of my childhood, in 5 o’clock sun, as seen from the local road—tobacco, corn, and cotton fields, decaying wooden barns, rusted-out cars. This will give you an idea:Even though 3 out of 4 of the examples above have to do with countryside, I don’t mean to imply that cities can’t be soul landscapes—anyone who has ever watched a Woody Allen movie can see that’s not true. I know plenty of people whose cities hit them in their chest.Ultimately soul landscapes are about personal memory and personal history, about an affinity for a place that develops slowly over time, based on a multitude of small interactions and visual impressions that pile up in the brain. As I consider new ways of creating public history for cities, I am particularly interested in the power of these personal histories, and the collective memory points at which many people’s personal histories intersect—Boston’s 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire or San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love, to give two random examples.In 2006 the Museum of London launched an online project called Map My London that had the potential to be a really wonderful representation of this concept. Members of the public were invited to tag a Google map of the city with personal memories, creating what the museum called London’s “emotional memory bank.” Sometime this year Map My London was taken off the web—not sure if the museum didn’t feel it was achieving its goals, or if it’s being retooled, or what. You can see a screenshot of what it used to look like at the Google Maps Mania blog.I’d like to see more cities try things like Map My London. Heck, I’d like to design a project like this myself. But in the meantime, I’d like to hear about your soul landscape. Mountains, rivers, fields or skyscrapers and sidewalks? What’s the landscape that calls to you?

The History of Yum

The other day I stumbled upon a great little program called Food(ography), hosted by the delightful Mo Rocca. The particular episode I was watching (still airing a handful of times on the Cooking Channel throughout September) was about street food, and it investigated various carts/trucks in cities throughout the US. I'm something of a foodie, and I love Mo Rocca, so it wasn't a stretch for me to watch this show. But I wasn’t expecting it to have anything to do with my work until suddenly culinary historian Jane Ziegelman pops on the screen, on location at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC.Ziegelman recently published a book about the food history of the Tenement Museum's turn-of-the-century residents, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. On Food(ography) she was explaining the street food vendors that started appearing in the Lower East Side in the late 19th century (watch her clip from the episode here). Ziegelman calls Orchard Street the "main drag" for Jewish push carts--pickle, anyone? Oyster carts were also common, providing what was at that time a cheap and plentiful local protein. And a concentration of German immigrants meant that sausages were eaten on the streets as well, first served on a communal plate, and then by the 1870s on a bun for easier transport. Irish and Italians in turn added their culinary traditions to the Lower East Side so that its streets, markets, delis, and home kitchens slowly blended into the melting pot we now call American food. I haven't read Ziegelman's book yet, but I imagine that food from pushcarts, so much less of a social commitment than stepping over the threshold of an unknown shop or a neighbor's apartment, may have served as an important gateway for New Yorkers sampling a different ethnic food for the first time. And street food is particularly significant as the food of the people: affordable, readily available, quick and easy to cook--no fine dining here.Later this year the Tenement Museum is scheduled to open its new visitor center at 103 Orchard Street. It will include a demonstration kitchen, run by Ziegelman, where visitors can experience immigrant cooking and connect with an aspect of the urban experience that too often gets left out of city museums. Meanwhile back at Food(ography), Mo introduces me to the Indian spice mini-donuts from Chef Shack and Ethiopian Beef Tibs from SHE Royal Deli, two food trucks gaining loyal fans in Minneapolis. The food history of cities continues to evolve in the most delicious of ways.It's lunchtime. Think I'll go grab a Vietnamese sandwich.

Imaginary History

Have I got a story for you. Earlier this month I paid a visit to two cities on the German/Polish border: Frankfurt on der Oder [German] and Slubice [Polish], separated by the River Oder. They used to be two sides of one German city, but Poland ended up with everything east of the river after WWII. The people who live in these cities don’t have much personal history there: Frankfurt was evacuated during WWII and very few of the residents ever returned; meanwhile Poles were brought in from elsewhere to resettle Slubice when it became Polish territory. There is one bridge across the river between the two cities (see above). From the end of WWII until 2007 it was at times a controlled border crossing and at other times closed completely. But now that Poland has joined the European Union’s border-free Schengen Zone, anyone can walk over the bridge without so much as a Simon says. The result: people who spent many years having nothing to do with one another (save perhaps a black market cigarette sale) are suddenly close neighbors. And although the two cities are starting to connect in small ways, traveling across the bridge is rarely a part of daily life. You can’t take public transportation from one to the other, for example.Enter Michael Kurzwelly. An artist who speaks both German and Polish, he moved to the area in 1998 and began staging public “interventions” to explore issues of identity along the border. Most of these interventions center around his vision of a united city, called Slubfurt, and with help from other residents he has set about convincing people that it really exists. At the invitation of Florence Maher, a fellow Fulbrighter studying border politics at Viadrina European University in Frankfurt, I took a tour of Slubfurt and talked to Kurzwelly about his work.Kurzwelly’s projects have been wide-ranging. He created a Slubfurt coat of arms, a rooster sitting on an egg. With a nod to the medieval city walls so prevalent across Europe, he got permission to erect wall fragments that delineate the Slubfurt city boundaries, a symbol of enclosure rather than division:With help from other residents he staged parliament elections for Slubfurt; the parliament meets regularly despite its lack of official political power. An array of glossy tourist information awaits the Slubfurt visitor: an impressive travel guide, a color map of the city, and tours led by Kurzwelly himself. In each case some of the information is factual and some of it is not: Kurzwelly worked with local university students to change the street names on the map, and he makes up stories about local landmarks to suit his purposes. For another project residents were invited to sign up for dinner in the home of someone who lives across the river; a Slubfurt cookbook, with recipes that blend the cuisine of both cities, is forthcoming. “Mediatekas” in the two public libraries provide a wealth of resources for the curious, including artifacts donated by Slubfurt residents—accompanied by personal stories—that can be checked out like books:This is just the tip of the iceberg; I could go on for several more paragraphs describing the efforts to actualize Slubfurt.People seem to be catching on. While I wouldn’t call it a groundswell, Kurzwelly has drawn enough attention to the divide between the two cities that there now seems to be a public dialogue about border issues where one didn’t previously exist. When Kurzwelly offered the residents of both cities the opportunity to apply for official Slubfurt identity cards, 300 people signed up within the first two days. You get the sense that if Kurzwelly ever left the area people would genuinely miss his interventions. He was even asked to serve on the culture committee for the Frankfurt local government.I find Kurzwelly’s work fascinating and brilliant. Bit by bit, he and his collaborators are creating a new sense of place for these two border cities. And they are doing it from the ground up (Kurzwelly actively encourages anyone and everyone to submit suggestions for interventions and to participate in their execution). What’s more, Kurzwelly believes in a lighthearted approach, which not only makes it more fun for his audience but also allows him to create a strong breeze without ruffling too many feathers. Public historians could learn a lot from his approach.Eleven years on, the city of Slubfurt now has its own history. Who’s to say it isn’t real?A special thanks to Florence Maher and Michael Kurzwelly for sharing Slubfurt with me. I came away with tons of Slubfurt material—the travel guide and map, campaign materials, a DVD—that I am happy to share with any interested individuals. And post a blog comment if you have ideas of your own for further Slubfurt interventions; I am making a list for Kurzwelly.

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?

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.

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.