What does it mean for a museum to be urban? How do you exhibit what a city is?
The Museum of London is making plans to leave its purpose-built modernist structure at London Wall and renovate part of the old Smithfield Market as a new facility. As it does so, it has the opportunity to transform its relationship to the city spatially, socially, and culturally.
Theatrum Mundi worked together with Museum of London to stimulate a critical debate about the implications of translating a museum of the city from a singular, purpose-built architecture to a plural, pre-existing fabric: in other words, what it means tourbanise the museum.
Urbanity, amongst other things, is a concentration of differences – functional, social, and temporal – and of tensions between these differences. To be a museum of London is surely to be a museum of this heterogeneity, but can a museum operate in an ‘urban’ way or only represent the effects of urbanity through artefacts and information?
In order to address this question, we invited participants coming from various background — curators, programme managers, academics, historians, researchers — to participate to a discussion on 24thApril 2018 organised around two broad themes. On one hand ‘Production and display’, on the other ‘Day and night’
Cities are machines for the production of forms (social, material, symbolic) and for the representation of those forms in cultural spaces. The role of museums is weighted towards the latter, but how much of the former is needed for a museum to be urban? Can the museum meaningfully support making, or even industry, and what kinds? Should productive activities be put on display to truly represent the city, or only the forms they make?
The aim of this workshop was to think critically about what museums of the city are for, and how this might inform the way they are made, rather than to answer specific questions in the design of the Museum of London. With this project as a starting point, we hope to think about the conditions that constitute urbanity, and by what means a museum can communicate or create those conditions.
The attached document is a short report summarising the discussion that took place on that day.