Work package 2 : Curating the city
WP2 focuses on how museums and heritage institutions in different European cities ‘curate’ the city’s past, present and future, in terms of defining, preserving and mediating urban heritage in a broad sense. This entails negotiation in conflicts over aesthetic regimes, dealing with issues of decolonization, post-war immigration , ‘wounded cities’ and the ‘city without Jews’, intervention in planning, as well as proactive measures in order to understand, develop and conceptualize the urban heritage landscape, also in relation to the constraints due to the tourism industry. It also entails promoting dialogue and participation, navigating the threshold between multiple institutional and non-institutional actors, such as grassroots movements, NGOs, private entrepreneurs and various official bodies. In this context there is a growing demand for curatorial perspectives and skills enabling experts to integrate traditional urban heritage perspectives with the new dilemmas propelled by the growing significance of heritage in contemporary urbanism and by increasing demands for participation.
This WP will explore existing and new possibilities offered by an understanding of the museum as key ‘curatorial’ actor in the urban landscape. The WP has three key objectives:
1/Training researchers in curatorial methods and techniques, and in analysing, negotiating, prototyping and disseminating urban heritage.
2/Training researchers to critically engage with ‘participation’ through addressing, engaging and working with the public (individuals as well as groups).
3/Training researchers in ‘publishing’ urban heritage within and in extension of museal and institutional spaces through design-curatorial approaches.
Useful links:
Curating the City (UGOT – Centre for Critical Heritage Studies)
Curating the City (UCL – Centre for Critical Heritage Studies)
CHEurope literature on this topic:
Anne Beeksma & Chiara De Cesari, Participatory heritage in a gentrifying neighbourhood: Amsterdam’s Van Eesteren Museum as affective space of negotiations, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
People involved in the theme Curating the city
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Gothenburg
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
Gothenburg University
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Hasselt
ESR 5
WP2 – Curating the City
Ist. Beni Culturali Emilia Romagna [IT]
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
Istituto Beni Culturali Emilia Romagna
ESR 4
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Hasselt [BE]
ESR 2
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Gothenburg [SE]
Supervisor
WP2 – Curating the City
University of Amsterdam
ESR 6
WP 2 – Curating the City
University of Amsterdam [NL]