Museums of the City as Gateways to the Understanding of Urban Life

30 April – 2 May 2006

We began our conference on the Sunday with an American Association of Museums/ICOM lunch address by Alissandra Cummins, President of ICOM. The real work started on Monday morning on the campus of Northeastern University in downtown Boston. The conference was organised by Bob Macdonald, Ian Jones and Irina Smagina with the assistance of the AAM, and Anne Emerson, a Bostonian who was Director of the Boston Museum project which aims to create a museum about the city.

We had 77 delegates from 15 countries including Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, the USA, Brazil, Mongolia, Korea and Guatemala. Almost half of us were from the Russian Federation, with delegates from Moscow to Siberia. In total there were 21 papers with another seven presented in an Open Forum which concluded the conference. Alissandra Cummins attended part of our sessions, as did Eloisa Zell from ICOM. Keynote speeches can be just a string of platitudes. Ours was different. Robert Archibald, President of the Missouri Historical Society in St Louis, spoke about memory and continuity, the loss of the city’s uniqueness and sense of community. Museums, he said, are means, not ends, and “urban museums are special because they are precisely positioned in those places where we make the future”. It set the tone for what followed.

There were so many presentations that we split into concurrent sessions. Jack Loman from the UK spoke about the city museum in a global world, Gail Lord from Canada spoke about city museums in the new city-states of the 21st century, Sergey Grishin gave us an account of his museum in Western Siberia. Tatiana Gorbacheva from Moscow spoke about representing human values in city museums, Gennady Mukhanov and Gulchachak Nazipova described the challenge of representing the variety of cultures in the Tatarstan Republic. Mike Houlihan described his remarkable experiences of running a museum service in Belfast during the troubles, Ana Rodrigues, a Brazilian architect, gave us an account of setting up a city museum in Sao Paulo, Maggie Russell-Ciardi described place-based education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, Helena Friman spoke about a museum without walls in Stockholm. At the CAMOC dinner, Byron Rushing of the Massachusetts House of Representatives spoke with considerable eloquence about time and place in Boston. It was both impressive and moving.

Tatiana Gorbacheva from Moscow spoke about representing human values in city museums, Gennady Mukhanov and Gulchachak Nazipova described the challenge of representing the variety of cultures in the Tatarstan Republic. Mike Houlihan described his remarkable experiences of running a museum service in Belfast during the troubles, Ana Rodrigues, a Brazilian architect, gave us an account of setting up a city museum in Sao Paulo, Maggie Russell-Ciardi described place-based education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, Helena Friman spoke about a museum without walls in Stockholm. At the CAMOC dinner, Byron Rushing of the Massachusetts House of Representatives spoke with considerable eloquence about time and place in Boston. It was both impressive and moving.