The Contemporary City as
Backbone: Museum Rotterdam
Meets the Challenge
Paul Th. van de Laar
Abstract Changes at Museum Rotterdam illustrate how history
museums can rethink their relationship to history and community. Recognizing that its residents are increasingly transnational, without ties to the Rotterdam of the past, Museum Rotterdam is using the tools of urban
anthropologists to involve residents in exploring contemporary heritage.
Museum Rotterdam next plans to enhance its activities as a traveling
museum that circulates around the city to enlarge the commitment of
urban communities through local heritage programs based on new urban
stories that help to bring people together.
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
museumsin the city, but should berelevant tothe 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. 39
participation, but has started to position the contemporary city as the backbone
of its work.
5The 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.
City Museums and Dynamic Heritage
In a provocative way, David Fleming, Director of the National Museums of
Liverpool, has criticized the object-driven focus of museum curators in city
museums. He speaks of“object worship almost to the point of fetishism.”
7
Although these curators may have acknowledged the limitations of tangible
collections in telling city histories, the object-oriented approach has remained
the standard of museum professionalism for a very long time.
8
These collections, however, do not reflect urban history in general very well and most visitors lack the contextual information needed to link the objects to the urban
historical context. Besides, most city museums have difficulties collecting the
recent history.
Nowadays, though, most city museums have become aware of the limits of an
object-oriented paradigm and have accepted that intangible heritage, traditions, values and beliefs are all part of the heritage spectrum. A dynamic
and social-cultural meaning of heritage has become the standard in some
parts of the world. Dynamic heritage in an urban historical context is, then,
the“working memory of a city.”
9
This dynamic urban heritage approach helps us to overcome the limitations
of nostalgic heritage, in particular in fast-moving transnational cities. These
transnational places reveal an urban dynamic; self-awareness and representation are shaped by the existence of a diverse population whose socio-cultural
and economic relationships are not necessarily confined to the nation or city of
residence.
10
When we accept the stimulating thought that urban heritage might
be a resource for creating the future, a nostalgic approach limits the possibilities
of involvement of transnational populations; in particular, because nostalgia for
a place or particular monuments is not something that people from elsewhere,
with a different cultural background, might feel.
40 PAUL TH. VAN DE LAAR
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.
The awareness of“bonding heritage”calls for new urban research strategies.
A city museum should not give up its scholarship, but should ensure instead
“that it engages in research that has resonance for the communities it
serves.”
12
City museums need to enlarge and stimulate their research opportunities. Their focus should not, however, be collection-driven but contextdriven, exploring the present city from a contemporary heritage point of view.
In this respect, city museums can learn a lot from the expertise of urban
anthropologists. The ethnographic method, participant observation, and
other empirical, qualitative close observation models are to be mentioned, in
particular. These methods have proven to be both versatile and successful in
urban social and cultural programs. The American non-profit organization
UrBaN (urban & anthropology) speaks of public anthropology as“an effort
to use anthropological theory, methods and research to help the public understand urban cultures, constructively address their problems, and celebrate their
achievements.”
13
Museum Rotterdam
Museum Rotterdam was founded in 1905 as the Museum of Antiquities, in an
era when Rotterdam developed into the largest European transit port. Like
many European port cities that witnessed socio-economic upheavals, the
THE CONTEMPORARY CITY AS BACKBONE 41
museum founders were driven by a civilizing ideal and wanted to expose the
Rotterdam working-class people to bourgeois culture.
14
Not surprisingly, the
collections on display were an accumulation of objects of a patrician kind,
material testimonies to a glorified past. The Rotterdam Museum of Antiquities
started in the cellars of the Schielandshuis. This 17th-century city palace was
the residence of the Board of Schieland, the public authority of the water district that controlled the maintenance of the dikes in the area where Rotterdam
was founded around 1270. The Museum of Antiquities became the Historical
Museum of Rotterdam, and the building underwent an intensive restoration in
the 1970s and 1980s. After reopening, it evoked the grandeur of the former
palace. At that time, the Historical Museum of Rotterdam wanted to show
the audiences Rotterdam’s Golden Age. During this century of Dutch world
primacy, the port city had transformed into the second most important city
in the Dutch Republic. The nostalgic and patriotic focus of the museum was
understandable, considering the fact that Rotterdam was bombed by the
Germans in May 1940 and had lost its city heart. On the ruins of the devastated
city a new modern city was built; the Schielandshuis was the only 17th-century
building that survived the bombardment.
The Schielandshuis is still the main building of the museum; although we
plan to move in 2016 to a modern building that better corresponds with the
new ambitions of the museum. We want to rent two floors in Forum Rotterdam, Rem Koolhaas’ innovative and multifunctional new retail, living and cultural destination on the Coolsingel, in the center of Rotterdam.
15 Museum
Rotterdam will present there the story of Rotterdam and becomes the new cultural historical axis of this building, linking Rotterdam’s past with the present
city. The old Schielandhuis image contradicts with this new mission and heritage concept of Museum Rotterdam. In order to accentuate the new focus, the
museum dropped the“Historical”in its name and changed it into Museum Rotterdam in 2011. This decision, albeit nostalgic Rotterdammers find it hard to
accept, fits well with our new ideas on the role of city museums.
16
The name
change communicates that Museum Rotterdam is not just something of the
past, but a gateway between the present-day city and its past through a dialogue
with urban communities that shape the future city.
Museum Rotterdam’s Recent Initiatives
For the past seven years, Museum Rotterdam has spearheaded collaborative
projects with urban communities that test and refine our new vision.
42 PAUL TH. VAN DE LAAR
Museum Rotterdam’s current vision started around 2005 with a so-called
Panorama Project, which focused on ten different areas in Rotterdam.
17
Several of these neighborhoods belong to the most ethnically and culturally
diverse areas in Rotterdam. Through schools and interviews with key figures
in the neighborhood, the museum started to map the recent past of these
areas, collecting pictures and neighborhood