City museums need to acknowledge that their future stakeholders are a
mixture of minority groups and a diverse population. In less than 20 years’
time, the majority of people living in the port city of Rotterdam, for instance,
will be of non-Dutch origin. Newcomers do not share the same subjective
experiences of communities with a strong lobby for celebrating Rotterdam’s
nostalgic heritage. For them, Rotterdam’s distant past has less meaning than
for inhabitants who are formed in Dutch and Rotterdam society.11 Nostalgic
heritage inadvertently excludes those citizens with different ethnic or cultural
backgrounds, unless they are able to share memories with these heritage communities.
City museums embracing a modern concept of heritage should stress
the importance of its dynamic interpretation. This will enable citizens — and
this makes it especially relevant for transnational cities — to have access to
the “working memory” of the city and afford them a reinterpretation of the historical
city canon. In fact, the new approach boils down to what may be called
“bonding heritage.” This concept is not based on romanticizing the past, but on
heritage as a collective purpose of community building, a serious form of new
urban human and cultural capital.