Kyoto 2019
City Museums as Cultural Hubs:
Past, Present and Future
2-5 Kyoto 2019
Our conference theme, City Museums as Cultural Hubs – Past, Present and Future, resonated with the theme of the General Conference. Once again, after our 2008 and 2018 meetings in Seoul and Frankfurt,the word ‘future’ appears explicitly in the event title: we feel that museums of cities, to be relevant, given that they strive to understand and interpret the cities addressing their past, must simultaneously be immersed in the urban reality
of today and envision the cities of tomorrow. In Kyoto, the debate revolved around themes such as the interplay between multiculturalism, differences and globalisation and the struggle to safeguard local values and sense of place; city museum trends; cultural and urban sustainability concerns and diverse emerging urban issues. Regardless of the narrower thematic focus of the CAMOC conferences, they are always about the future of cities and their museums, and so too was our meeting in Japan.
For CAMOC, it was an inspirational experience. Following a successful call for papers, we were able to invite over forty experts on city museums and urban heritage from five continents and twenty-three countries. The conference was designed to have joint sessions with ICOM’s Asia-Pacific Regional Alliance, ASPAC, and the ICOM international committee for historic houses, DEMHIST. We also had the privilege of welcoming the Museum of Kyoto and the Edo Tokyo Museum as our main partners, among other institutions that supported our work, namely in lending their spaces and helping us to provide simultaneous translations to and from Japanese during some parts of the conference.
We had the privilege of learning about new ideas and new experiences in cities and museums across six exciting conference sessions in the main venue and at the Museum of Kyoto. This was followed by sessions at the post-conference tours in Tokyo . Besides the Edo-Tokyo Museum, the post-conference tours were made possible thanks to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Tamarokuto Science Center, and Ueno Bunkanori with Arts Council Tokyo. The two post-conference tours to Tokyo, also open to non-members, on the theme Rethinking the Relationship between the City and the City Museum.
More about CAMOC Kyoto 2019:
Japanese City Museums Special Dossier
