Cidade Maravilhosa

I’m heading to Rio de Janeiro in two weeks to participate in the International Conference on Museums of Cities, hosted by the The Historical Museum of the City of Rio and Rio’s Municipal Secretary for Culture, in partnership with ICOM Brazil and CAMOC. The conference is an opportunity to talk with colleagues from Brazil and elsewhere (Turkey, Greece, Denmark, and the UK) about the role of city museums in 21st-century cities, and also to generate some new ideas for Rio’s city museum specifically.

The organizers have put together a packed schedule of presentations and discussions, and I’m looking forward to an intense week of thinking and sharing. Since I know there are some South American folks who read this blog regularly, I want to make sure you know that it’s not too late to make your plans to attend this conference; registration is open until Friday, August 17.

My own talk is titled The Living City: Trends in Urban Curation. Rio by all accounts is definitely a living city, and I can’t wait to explore it for the first time.

Disruptive Objects, on the Streets

An outdoor exhibition about the Berlin Wall, Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Could we go one further and not even put the objects in cases?

You know how I’m obsessed with geotagging objects, right? We lost a lot of meaning when we separated artifacts from their places of origin in order to assemble our museum collections—especially in the case of our local history collections—and geotagging gives us a chance to get some of that meaning back. I preach about this concept to anyone who will listen, and I’ve even played around with pinning some objects from New-York Historical Society‘s collection to the Google Map in historypin (until historypin told me to stop because they want people to stick to photographs).

This evening I had a conversation with Chris Chelberg, a library science grad student I met back in May at THATCamp Museums NYC. We were following up on a session Chris led at THATCamp about disruption theory, Clayton Christensen’s argument from the business world that the real threat to established companies comes not from their conventional competitors—the companies selling the same product they are—but from products brand new to the market that offer a “good enough” solution to fill the consumer need at a much cheaper price. At first these new products are so shoddy that the established companies don’t pay any attention to them, but eventually they improve to the point where they take off, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it. Christensen cites a number of real world examples, the most interesting of which (to me at least) is that online degree programs like University of Phoenix have the potential to disrupt universities like Harvard and Yale: online learning might seem like no match for such prestigious schools now, but it’s getting more and more sophisticated with time, and it fills the need for a credential at a fraction of the cost. If disruption theory is new to you and you want to get caught up, you can read Christensen’s books, or I recommend this short and sweet New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar.

Chris and I were talking about potential disruptions to museums; can we anticipate them and how they will affect our work? One of the big challenges museums face is the burden of caring for their collections. This is an essential function of museums, mind you, but it is so expensive that it leaves us particularly vulnerable to disruptions from cheaper, more flexible sources. We talked about the things that museums think are poor quality but that the general public often thinks are good enough, and cheaper: popular historical fiction, video games, anything labeled edutainment. Community-curated exhibitions. Pop-up projects. Reproductions.

This last one elicited the most interesting conversation. Right now, reproductions are no match for the real thing, and museums hold tight to the notion that authenticity is their trump card. I firmly believe this myself; In fact I wrote about authentic objects in History News last year. But maybe it’s just that reproductions are no match for the real thing yet. Is it possible that in 5-10 years they will be good enough? Are you following what’s happening with 3-D printers these days?

What Chris and I came up with is that maybe 3-D printing, as it evolves, can finally address some of the major access challenges museums have been grappling with for years. So we put everything in glass cases because we don’t want visitors handling and stealing our precious artifacts. But who cares what happens to the 3-D reproductions? Let them get breathed on and licked and caressed to death, Velveteen Rabbit-style. Put them in a room without climate control; heck, put them outside.

Which leads me back to geotagging. I would love to see a city museum take 100 of its most significant objects, partner with a 3-D printer manufacturer (or better yet, as Chris suggested, crowd-source it to the local maker community), and then install these 3-D reproductions out on the streets, where the original [authentic] objects came from. What would we learn from such an experiment? Could we own the disruption? Let me know if you want to find out.

The Power of 10 Revisited

This week while visiting friends in Maine I had an opportunity to explore this lovely little library on Hancock Point, a peninsula that juts out from the mainland, just across Frenchman Bay from Mt Desert Island and Bar Harbor. It’s the kind of place where you wave at every car that passes you on the road, and you borrow from your neighbor when you’re out of sugar because getting to the grocery store feels like a production. The library is only open in the summer when the population of Hancock Point swells significantly, mostly with folks whose families have been vacationing there for generations.

The summer season isn’t in full swing yet; I observed some of the library’s particulars myself and then my friends filled in other details. The building has the scale and feel of a house. In fact, a summer librarian lives on the 2nd floor and cooks her meals in a kitchen just off the main reading room, which has a fireplace. The library offers wi-fi (still relatively hard to come by on the Point) so it’s not unusual on a sunny day to see folks sprawled out along the porch, checking their email. There’s a bulletin board by the front door, which serves as a convenient place for community messages. There’s a story hour for kids. There’s an awesome climbing tree in the front yard. There are historic photographs of the Point on the walls. And, of course, there are the books, with emphasis on the kinds of stuff you want to read in the summer; from what I could tell, the two wings, which supplement the main reading room, are dedicated to mystery novels and children’s books, respectively.

The Hancock Point Library struck me as the kind of place that works for its community: appropriate in scale, an authentic place, a 3rd place. I was telling my colleague Linda Norris about it in our weekly Skype meeting, and she made an interesting comment: why is it that so many libraries seem to have found ways to meet larger community needs (besides just the books), and so many museums have not? Libraries offer internet access, meeting space, a copy machine, a free cozy place to hang out, extended hours (the Hancock Historical Society is open 4 hours a week in the summer, compared with the library’s 20+), and so much more. There are multiple reasons to visit a library, not just one.

I’m a big fan of the Project for Public Spaces’ simple but compelling Power of 10 rule. I’ve written about the Power of 10 before on CityStories, and I also refer to it regularly when I give talks about city museums. To quote my previous blog post:

The idea is that to make a really great public place that is used regularly and cherished by many people, it needs to have at least 10 different amenities working in concert, not just one or two. And then a neighborhood needs 10 different great public places–not just one or two–to be a great neighborhood. And a city needs 10 different great neighborhoods, and so on.

In the past when I have applied the Power of 10 to museums, it has been in the context of providing at least 10 amazing objects in each exhibition or at least 10 great programs on the calendar—in other words, in relation to the core work of interpreting the collection and educating the public. But when Linda and I were talking today it occurred to both of us that the Power of 10 might also apply to the kind of amenities that museums, as public spaces, could provide for their communities, above and beyond the core collection and programming. And that in general, maybe part of our problem in trying to carve out the role of museums in 21st-century society is that we aren’t meeting a Power of 10.

Linda and I spent a little time talking about cheap and easy ways to increase the number of services and amenities museums provide. Installing a wi-fi router with a guest login, if you haven’t already done so, is a no-brainer—it’s incredibly cheap and easy. A lot of us have cafes, definitely a plus one. Most museums have meeting rooms; only some of us make it available for everyone to use. Do you have enough outdoor space to host a farmer’s market one day a week? A great place for people to walk their dogs? And what else could we come up with if we got creative? For example, the library at the Massachusetts College of Art has a hedgehog in residence this summer, and he’s bringing in lots of extra MassArt community members (it turns out adorable furry creatures are an amenity).

This concept seems particularly applicable to rural communities like Hancock Point, where the museum or historic house may be one of a small group of public places, along with perhaps a town hall, post office, library, or general store. But I think you can make just as strong a case for city museums serving the public to the power of 10. City museums ignore the contemporary city and the daily life and needs of city residents at their peril. So host the community forums, the political debates, the clubs and support groups, the blood drive, and the polling place. Ask local food trucks to park outside your door on nice days. Tap into the skillshare movement. Put some comfy couches in your lobby. Come up with more than one reason to let the city in so you stand at its heart, not on its periphery.

There has certainly been plenty of ruminating on how museums can better serve their communities, and on museums as 3rd places. But the Power of 10 has gotten a lot less attention in our field. So I throw it out there once more in this new light, in case it helps us see the way forward more clearly.

Museums and Creative Practice

I’m excited to share a new project that’s in the works. Along with Linda Norris (of Uncataloged Museum and Pickle Project fame) I am writing a book about Museums & Creative Practice. Today we are launching a fledgling project website that you can access here.

I’ve been interested in this topic for years now. I believe strongly that museums across the field are in need of an enormous infusion of creativity. We tend to think creativity is only the concern of contemporary art museums when in reality it should matter deeply to all of us. We also tend to think it’s the purview of exhibition designers when in reality creativity, and creative problem-solving, is equally important for visitor services, education, administration, development—every department of the museum.

As I travel from city to city trying to figure out what makes a great city museum, I am struck by how large a role creativity plays in successful institutions, and I have been thinking a lot about how city museums can be more creative. In fact I gave a paper on this topic at the CAMOC/ICOM conference in Shanghai in 2010. I have also been making creativity a priority in the material culture course I teach in the Tufts Museum Studies program. I don’t want to send my students out into the field to develop the same old exhibitions and programs we’ve been doing for years; instead I want to empower them to find interesting, compelling, surprising new ways of presenting objects to the public. This book project is a natural next step for me in exploring creativity’s impact on museums more broadly and more deeply.

There’s a wealth of new literature on the import role creativity plays in the economy and in society at large. Linda and I think it’s time someone applies that literature to museums. We have been following and admiring each other’s work for several years now, and I can’t think of a better partner for this project. We’re envisioning a practical, nuts-and-bolts kind of book that provides our colleagues with the tools they need to make their museums, and themselves, more creative.

We’re just at the beginning stages; we don’t even have a publisher lined up yet. But it’s important to us that we involve our colleagues from day one so we can write a book that’s genuinely useful to them. As we begin our research and draft our book proposal, we’ve developed a quick survey that you can take here, and you can also make comments/suggestions either on this post or at the Museums & Creative Practice website.

Lastly, we’ll both be at the American Association of Museums conference in Minneapolis next week (yes, this year’s conference theme is “Creative Community”) and we are hoping to talk there with as many colleagues as possible about this project. We’re holding two informal Museums & Creative Practice meet-ups:

• Monday, April 30, 12:30-2:00. Grab a takeaway lunch and meet us at the cafe seating in the lobby of the convention center, near Dunn Bros Coffee
• Tuesday, May 1, 6:00-7:30. Join us for a drinks and discussion at The Local, 931 Nicollet Mall, a few blocks north of the convention center. The reservation is under Rainey; we’ll be at “Arthur’s Table.”

I don’t yet know where this project will lead, but wherever it goes I’m looking forward to it. I hope you are too.

The On-Air Forum

The Takeaway, Todd Mundt via Flickr

My husband Graham is a journalist who has mainly worked in public radio, for talk shows like On Point and The Takeaway. He gets dragged to a lot of city museums and I end up in a lot of conversations about the current state of news media. Usually our two fields feel very different, but every now and then we are reminded that they are actually very similar: we both work to engage and inform a public audience.

He made an interesting analogy the other day about an issue that museum folks grapple with a lot: are we temples or forums? I’m going to share it with you here in case it gives you a slightly different way of understanding the nature of our current debate. To paraphrase, he said:

Most of the time history museums seem to give their visitors all the answers. It’s like starting off an hour-long radio show saying, ‘We already have the answers for you; here they are.’ But the whole point of a public radio talk show is to say instead, ‘We have a lot of questions so we’re bringing in some experts to debate them, and if you call in you can debate them too.’

Do hosts like Tom Ashbrook, John Hockenberry, and Celeste Headlee provide a model for the 21st-century museum curator, facilitating conversations between experts and interested listeners/visitors? What could we borrow from public radio to improve our museums?

Vancouver Bound

By Gord McKenna via Flickr

Since a lot of my readers work at city museums, I want to make a pitch for CAMOC annual conference, to be held this year in Vancouver, October 24-26. CAMOC is the international professional association for city museums, and I try to attend this conference every year. I always meet interesting people and learn a ton.

If you want to make a presentation at this conference, proposals are due on April 15; I just turned mine in this morning. I know that’s just a few short days away but don’t worry, the proposal requirements aren’t too lengthy or complicated. The Call for Papers can be found here or on the CAMOC website. There are several different options for participation: you can deliver a formal paper about an issue facing city museums, make a brief presentation about projects your museum is undertaking, or participate in a poster competition.

The Museum of Vancouver (pictured above) is our local host for this year’s conference. MOV is on my list of city museums to watch, so I’m very excited to spend some time getting to know the organization and its staff. And Vancouver itself is an amazing city. Hope to see you there.

Lessons from the Community Center

There’s a neighborhood community center four blocks from my house in Boston, and a few times a week I go there to use the exercise machines. There’s only one of each type of machine and there are no TVs or other gym amenities, but that’s fine with me—the community center has what I need, and I like the range of people I run into there, from the four-year-old daycare class looking for a warm indoor spot to run around, to the weekly seniors basketball game.

The exercise machines sit along the edge of the indoor track, which looks down on the basketball court. The walls on this level are awash in motivational signs—everything from Ellen Degeneres quotes to cartoons of cats hanging from trees. Here are a few examples:

When I first started making regular trips to the community center I found the signs well-intentioned but overwhelming. Although the messages create a “we’re all in this together” atmosphere, the arrangement and sheer volume meant my eyes would cast about continuously with nowhere to land. Now that I have settled into the place I just look at my kindle and screen them out.

Recently I noticed there’s a new kind of sign. There are structural poles ringing the track, and someone divided a long-form joke into 12 parts and hung each part on one of the poles. That means as you’re jogging around the track you can read a little of the joke at a time, finally reaching the punch line when you’ve finished a lap. What’s more, the joke changes on a regular basis. So now when I show up for my exercise I make a habit of checking for a new joke:

My experience at the community center has me thinking about museum pop-up projects. Pop-up projects are a relatively new thing for museums; in fact it’s one of the seven trends featured in the Center for the Future of Museums’ recently released TrendsWatch 2012. Sometimes an exhibition “pops up” at a temporary location inside an empty storefront or otherwise available space. The San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design has been getting some press recently for creating such exhibitions. But pop-up projects don’t have to be indoors, and they don’t have to look like traditional exhibitions either. For the Westminster Stories project, the Museum on Site put interpretive labels on street furniture, urban trees, sidewalks, buildings, and even people as a weekend-long pop-up event along a two-block stretch of Westminster Street in downtown Providence. The If This House Could Talk project enlists the help of local residents to pop up temporary historical markers in the front yards of homes and businesses in Cambridge, MA, for a few weeks each October. In Hamburg, Germany, the Fussnote Project spraypainted historical markers related to the city’s Nazi-era history on sidewalks.

I’m particularly interested in the outdoor version of pop-ups as a tool for city museums. Outdoor pop-up projects were made for cities, where the population density means they are sure to draw a crowd. And what better subject matter for pop-ups than urban history, because out on the streets and in neighborhoods it can help people form deeper personal connections to the places where they live and work. Moreover, bringing urban history to people in outdoor public spaces with such a flexible, changing format gives city museums the opportunity to actively and creatively contribute to the vibrancy of city life instead of merely documenting it after the fact.

What does all of this have to do with the signs at the community center? Those signs help me understand that:

1. Pop-ups work because they aren’t permanent. The joke signs on the poles are so much more interesting to me because they change regularly. I want to make sure I catch each new joke before it goes away. Those bronze historical markers we’ve been putting up all over our cities for years? They certainly serve a purpose, but when we know they will always be there they are easy to ignore. Consider the case of Robot Supply & Repair in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. It sells—you guessed it, robots and robot stuff—to benefit 826 Michigan, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids. Roughly once a month a different robot tableau debuts in the Robot Supply front window. Here’s one of a robot family at home:

Via letssavemichigan.com

Other tableaus have included a robot marriage proposal, a robot travel agency, and a robot birthday party. When I lived in Ann Arbor and walked several times a week between my co-working space on Main Street and the bus depot on 4th Avenue, I planned my route to pass Robot Supply & Repair and check if there was a new window display. For regulars, who know a neighborhood well, a change like this can be the difference between a boring commute (or trip to the grocery store, or exercise session) where we are disengaged with the world around us, and an interesting one where space becomes place.

2. Pop-ups work because they are somewhere unexpected, or they involve an unexpected format. In a space overflowing with messaging, the poles lining the community center track were new territory. I had screened out all the motivational signs taped to the walls, much the way we screen out the advertising in places like Times Square or in the borders of our Google searches. But the jokes caught my eye because I wasn’t used to seeing content on the poles. Similarly, I think part of the reason Cambridge’s If This House Could Talk and Hamburg’s Fussnote Project drew attention is because the format—hand-written signs in front yards or stenciled and spraypainted text—was unexpected.

Here’s another example. Last year I was walking along the sidewalk in Jamaica Plain, the neighborhood next door to mine, and I noticed a blue line on the sidewalk:

At first I thought someone had come along with a leaky can of paint, but it became clear that this was no accidental line. It stretched on Centre/South Street all the way from Green Street to St. Mark in one smooth, continuous line. I saw two different families with young kids who were just as captivated by the mysterious line as I was: what did it mean? Why was it there? Should we follow it? I’ve never been able to find out who made the line and what his/her intent was, but I’ve thought a lot about its potential as a delivery format.

3. Pop-ups work because they are in people’s everyday path. I don’t have to go out of my way to read the jokes, or see the Robot Supply window, or find the blue line; they appear right in front of me in the course of my normal routine. Don’t get me wrong—visits to the museum are important too, especially if the experience is visitor-centered and memorable. Such visits are generally planned, which can make them feel like anticipated, special events. But if the point is to enrich the lives of as many people as possible, why not also bring the content directly to those people, in high-trafficked outdoor spaces? A serendipitous encounter inserted into the everyday can be just as memorable—and meaningful—as the special event.

4. Some of the best pop-up projects are cheap and low-tech. All of the work I have referenced in this post has been inexpensive and relatively quick and easy to execute. When the content is intentionally so temporary, it can be made on the office laser printer. By contrast, exhibitions inside the museum can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and months or years of planning; consequently in many institutions the content doesn’t change very often. Museums need to be doing a lot more experimenting if they are ever going to figure out how to increase their public value. Pop-up projects enable experimentation by minimizing cost—who cares that it wasn’t 100% perfect the first time if it only costs $100 and can be improved when you try it again in a different neighborhood?

5. Pop-ups work when they happen on people’s own terms. Yesterday I watched a fellow community center exerciser take a close-up photo of one of the motivational signs. Clearly it meant something to her and she wanted to remember it. There’s room for her to take the signs to heart and for me to screen out all but the jokes, and probably even for any of us to actively participate by suggesting new signs to hang up, because no one is standing there telling us there’s a specific way to behave.

Another thing that pops up in outdoor public spaces is the charity solicitor—Save the Children or Greenpeace or Oxfam. Regardless of whether or not I support these organizations, I find it intrusive to be stopped on the street and put on the spot about donating. I like it when pop-up projects leave room for people to make their own choices about whether and how much to engage with the content.

6. A little narrative never hurts. Those long-form jokes are stories, meted out a little at a time around the track. So are the robot tableaus. Meanwhile, the blue line on the sidewalk challenged people to imagine their own story. These narratives keep us engaged because we want to know what happens at the end.

The Center for the Future of Museums’ TrendsWatch 2012 suggests that pop-ups may be “a reaction against a world becoming too global and too plugged-in. Face-to-face and participatory experiences, especially in unexpected places, can serve as a counterweight to digital, virtual experiences” (p. 12). Whether this is true or not, I think they are here to stay for the foreseeable future. I’d love to hear about any pop-up projects you’ve encountered (or created) in your own city. What worked and didn’t work for you?

What I’ve Been Up To

I know posts have been a little thin on this blog over the past few months. One of the reasons is that I’ve been working on two other projects that I’m now ready to share with my CityStories readers.

The first is an exhibition that came out of a fellowship I had in fall 2011 at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I was at JNBC to continue my research on city museums, but while I was there I also worked with five JNBC graduate students to develop an exhibition about what it means to live in Providence, drawing from the field of psychogeography for our methodology.

Pyschogeography isn’t exactly a household word. Loosely defined, it involves mapping abstract concepts like emotion, sensory experiences, and personal meaning, in contrast to our traditional concept of mapping physical elements—roads, landmarks,  topography. I had been grappling a lot with the disconnect between what city museums think is worth knowing and preserving about their cities, on one hand, and what city residents know and preserve as living, breathing “archives,” walking around their cities each day, on the other. The exhibition was an experiment to see what it would be like to create a city collection where the emotional, sensory, and personal experiences of residents command center stage. After this project I am further convinced that city museums should be incorporating psychogeography into their ongoing work. The exhibition, You Are Here: Archiving Providence in the Present, is documented here.

The second project is a little more personal, but still strongly tied to my professional practice. I’ve been developing a blog for my five-year-old cousin Thomas, who wants to be an explorer when he grows up. I post photos from cities I have visited as part of my research, and I challenge Thomas to figure out the location of each photo. When he solves one, he and his mom report on how he did it, which gets posted on the blog. It’s called Thomas Sees the World.

The blog happened organically. Thomas was working on one of Andrew Sullivan’s “View from Your Window” challenges, but it was really hard. I offered to send him a few of my own photos that I had screened to make sure they contained enough visual clues. Thomas attacked these photos with an overwhelming eagerness to learn, and I was fascinated by his thought process, which almost never conformed to my expectations. After four or five of these challenges yielded such rich responses from Thomas, his mom and I decided to try a blog. We are developing a small but devoted following, and this game is bringing us all a lot of joy. I think about cities—and the differences between them—all the time, but I have never thought about them quite this way before. I am learning all sorts of new things as I look at cities through Thomas’s eyes. Take a look at the blog and you’ll see what I mean.

The Greatest Grid: Great for Visitors?

A few weeks ago I spent a couple of hours at the Museum of the City of New York seeing the temporary exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which runs through April 15. I’m really glad I got down to New York for this show, because it reinforces a lot of the concepts I’ve been exploring on this blog, and in my research on city museums in general.

I got there around 1:00 pm, and the museum was a lot busier than it had been the last time I visited in July 2011, when the main temporary exhibition was about colonial revival architecture. I had to wait in a line 20 people deep at the admission desk, and it was a good thing I arrived when I did. By the time I left at 3:00 not only had the admission line gotten longer but there was also a separate line for The Greatest Grid; the exhibition was so popular that the gallery housing it reached fire code capacity. I talked to a security guard who said it had been that crowded every weekend since the exhibition opened. At one point the exhibition curator, Hilary Ballon, showed up to do a gallery talk and had to use a microphone to be heard amidst a sea of attentive visitors.

Blockbuster exhibitions happen all the time at art museums, and at a lot of science museums too, but they are rare at city history museums. Why is The Greatest Grid so popular? From what I observed during my visit, I would say that MCNY struck a chord with New Yorkers. The museum could’ve presented a fairly standard urban planning exhibition, filled with historic maps, and gotten a reasonable turnout. But instead a decision was made to structure the exhibition around the concept of the Manhattan street grid—why and how it was developed, and what effect it has had on the city over time. That’s a concept that New Yorkers can really sink their teeth into.

Anyone who lives or works in Manhattan contends with the grid on a daily basis (click here to see an excerpt from 12×155, a video installation by artist Neil Goldberg, included in the exhibition, that illustrates this point quite effectively). Not only (says the gal from Boston) is it a particularly easy system to navigate—because of the grid you always know which way is north, and how long it will take to get from one place to another—but it also has a lot to do with what makes New York, New York. For example, the 19th-century real estate boom set in motion by the introduction of the grid is one of the big reasons NYC became such a financial powerhouse. And because the grid doesn’t really allow for inner courtyards, it constantly pushes Manhattanites out on the streets, ratcheting up the energy to that frenetic level we all associate with NYC.

Consequently, what I observed at the exhibition was a gallery packed full of locals in small social groups, spending a very long time pointing and talking about this grid and what it means to them. Often they were trying to find themselves—their home—on the historic maps, but just as often they were pointing out all the interesting things they noticed about how other parts of the city had changed. Here’s my slide show of all the pointers:

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Anyone who follows Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog knows that museums have a new imperative to craft social experiences that compel visitors to engage with one another while learning. The Greatest Grid is very effective on this level.

Another thing the exhibition team did really well was to develop a small companion exhibition, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, installed upstairs from the main gallery. It features the eight winners of a call for ideas sponsored by MCNY and the Architectural League of New York that asked architects and urban planners to envision ways of improving the grid for the 21st-century. These proposals are quite creative, and pull in visitors even further by asking them to consider whether the grid actually works in its current form. They also reinforce a theme introduced by the main exhibition, that the grid was not inevitable but exists because of—and will continue to be shaped by—a series of urban planning decisions. I’ve written before about the need for city museums to address not just the past but also the present and future of their cities. Therefore I was glad to see The Unfinished Grid help visitors extend the historical timeline to include both contemporary urban life as well as hopes and dreams for a New York still to come.

But the exhibition team missed an opportunity to address another new imperative that Nina Simon regularly writes about: creating experiences where visitors actively participate in making meaning, alongside the curators. If I were a New Yorker visiting this exhibition, filled with excitement and new knowledge about something that feels very personal and real in my daily life, I would want to express it beyond my own social group. I would want to stick comments on a giant map of Manhattan, or photograph myself sharing the most interesting thing I learned, or vote on my favorite avenue. And doing so would help me see beyond my own experience, to the collective life on the street that all New Yorkers share.

New Yorkers, get thee to MCNY to see this exhibition, and then tell me what you think. Do you find it compelling? Did it make you want to share your own experience of the grid? What did you point at?

Urban History Exhibited in Aarhus, Denmark

 

In October I flew to Aarhus, Denmark, to give a paper at an urban history conference hosted by the open air museum Den Gamle By. The Aarhus City Museum just merged with Den Gamle By, and the conference was organized in part to guide strategic planning efforts under the new management structure. This is a video of my talk; it’s a half-hour in length. Hardcore city museum folks will also want to check out the other conference presentations, not only from Aarhus but also Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and Ghent—each one has a different take on urban history.