Introduction
People love cities, like to read popular city histories, enjoy local history television documentaries and city trips. Unfortunately, city museums are not benefiting from the rising interest in cities as places of multiple stories. City museums — and in general history museums — are “increasingly viewed by their communities as irrelevant and unresponsive to the societal changes around them.” 1 Therefore, city museums should not just be interesting museums in the city, but should be relevant to the contemporary city.2 Cities are moving fast, so, to keep pace, city museums cannot afford to be “frozen against the city.” 3 Museum Rotterdam, the city museum of Rotterdam, has spent the past seven years working to acknowledge the importance of the present city.4 Following post-modern trends, Museum Rotterdam has not only made a turn towards Journal of Museum Education, Volume 38, Number 1, March 2013, pp. 39–49. © 2013 Museum Education Roundtable. All rights reserved.
participation, but has started to position the contemporary city as the backbone of its work.5 The present transnational city has become the focus of our museum policies, and staff members are charged with mediating between the museum and city life. Urban curators are trained to have an eye open for contemporary heritage as “a resource for creating the future.” 6 Besides introducing new heritage concepts, Museum Rotterdam aims to stimulate audiences to be active members in transforming the museum into a “borderless museum.” We hope these efforts will create an active city museum that uses the present city as a social and cultural laboratory, linking contemporary urban stories with the past.