City museums and city development


Book Description

Traditionally, city museums have been keepers of city history. Many have been exercises in nostalgia, reflecting city pride. However, a new generation of museums focuses increasingly on the city's present and future as well as its past, and on the city in all of its diversity, challenges, and possibilities. Above all, these museums are gateways to understanding the city—our greatest and most complex creation and the place where half the world's population now lives. In this book, experts in the field explore this 'new' city museum and the challenge of contributing positively to city development.




Cities, Museums and Soft Power


Book Description

Museum planners Gail Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg demonstrate how museums and cities are using their soft power to address some of the most important issues of our time.Soft power is the exercise of influence through attraction, persuasion, and agenda-setting rather than military or economic coercion.Thirteen of the world's leading museum and cultural experts from six continents explore the many facets of soft power in cities and museums to include: how it amplifies civic discourse, accelerates cultural change, and contributes to contextual intelligence among the great diversity of city dwellers, visitors, and policy makers. The authors urge city governments to embrace museums which so often are the signifiers of their cities, increasing real estate values while attracting investment, tourists, and creative workers. Lord and Blankenberg propose 32 practical strategies for museums and cities to activate their soft power and create thriving and sustainable communities. Follow the link below to watch co-author Gail Lord speaking about soft power on The Agenda, a popular public affairs program on TVO, a leading educational television broadcaster http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/a-cultural-sleeping-giant. To Read More: http://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/shared-values/how-museums-help-cities-realize-their-soft-power




The Future of Museums


Book Description

This book explores―at the macro, meso and micro levels and in terms of qualitative as well as quantitative studies―the current and future role of museums for art and society. Given the dynamic developments in art and society, museums need to change in order to remain (and in some ways, regain) relevance. This relevance is in the sense of a power to influence. Additionally museums have challenges that arise in the production of art through the use of permanent and rapidly changing technologies. This book examines how museums deal with the increasing importance of performance art and social interactive art, artistic disciplines which refuse to use classical or digital artistic media in their artistic processes. The book also observes how museums are adapting in the digital age. It addresses such questions as, “How to keep museums in contact with recipients of art in a world in which the patterns of communication and perception have changed dramatically,” and also “Can the art museum, as a real place, be a counterpart in a virtualized and digitalized society or will museums need to virtualize and even globalize themselves virtually?” Chapters also cover topics such as the merits of digital technologies in museums and how visitors perceive these changes and innovations. When you go back to the etymological origin, the Mouseion of Alexandria, it was a place where – supported by the knowledge stored there – art and science were developed: a place of interdisciplinary research and networking, as you would call it today. The word from the Ancient Hellenic language for museum (ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ) means the “house of the muses”: where the arts and sciences find their berth and cradle. With the “Wunderkammer,” the museum was re-invented as a place for amazing for purpose of representation of dynastic power, followed by the establishment of museums as a demonstration of bourgeois self-consciousness. In the twentieth century, the ideal of the museum as an institution for education received a strong boost, before the museum as a tourism infrastructure became more and more the institutional, economic and political role-model. This book is interested in discovering what is next for museums and how these developments will affect art and society. Each of the chapters are written by academics in the field, but also by curators and directors of major museums and art institutions.




The Works


Book Description

A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city “It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole.” —New York Post Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.







Museums and Migration


Book Description

Recent decades have seen migration history and issues increasingly featured in museums. Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration. It presents the latest innovative research from academics and museum practitioners and offers a comparative perspective on a global scale bringing to light geo- and socio-political specificities. It includes an extensive range of international contributions from Europe, Asia, South America as well as settler societies such as Canada and Australia. Museums and Migration charts and enlarges the developing body of research which concentrates on the analysis of the representation of migration in relation to the changing character of museums within society, examining their civic role and their function as key public arenas within civil society. It also aims to inform debates focusing on the way museums interact with processes of political and societal changes, and examining their agency and relationship to identity construction, community involvement, policy positions and discourses, but also ethics and moralities.




Historic Cities


Book Description

This new volume in the GCI's Readings in Conservation series brings together a selection of seminal writings on the conservation of historic cities. This book, the eighth in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Readings in Conservation series, fills a significant gap in the published literature on urban conservation. This topic is distinct from both heritage conservation and urban planning despite the recent growth of urbanism worldwide, no single volume has presented a comprehensive selection of these important writings until now. This anthology, profusely illustrated throughout, is organized into eight parts, covering such subjects as geographic diversity, reactions to the transformation of traditional cities, reading the historic city, the search for contextual continuities, the search for values, and the challenges of sustainability. With more than sixty-five texts, ranging from early polemics by Victor Hugo and John Ruskin to a generous selection of recent scholarship, this book thoroughly addresses regions around the globe. Each reading is introduced by short prefatory remarks explaining the rationale for its selection and the principal matters covered. The book will serve as an easy reference for administrators, professionals, teachers, and students faced with the day-to-day challenges confronting the historic city under siege by rampant development.




Sustainable Urban Development in Singapore


Book Description

This book offers theoretical and practical insights into land use, transport, and national policies in one of world’s well-known urban concrete jungle, none other than the Singapore city. The emphasis is situated on Singapore’s attempt to promote walking and cycling. Greater appreciation of walkability thrives on Singapore’s rich history, green city, people and the gastronomic kopitiam and hawker culture. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of walkability as a crucial component of urban design to reduce vehicular congestion with the associated carbon emissions, foster a healthy lifestyle and community participation and create jobs to help the economy. A high income per capita and an aging society, lessons drawn from Singapore’s experience will be useful to other societies. Scholars in sustainable tourism field, urban planners, government bodies, tourist boards, entrepreneurs, national parks board, residents, and inbound travellers will benefit from reading the book.




The Future of Museum and Gallery Design


Book Description

The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world. The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally. The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.




The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary


Book Description

This important critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere. Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.