So far I have mostly been writing about cities with a positive identity—the ones that plenty of people want to visit on vacation, the ones with bright futures. But what about declining cities, nothing-special cities, cities that get picked last at recess? How do history and museums fit into their cultural landscape?I recently read an essay by Sally MacDonald, who worked on a team back in the 1990s to develop a new history museum for Croydon, a borough south of London (“Croydon: What History?” in Making City Histories in Museums, ed. Gaynor Kavanagh and Elizabeth Frostick, London: Leicester University Press, 1998, 58-79). MacDonald writes “Anyone reading this who has lived in London or south-east England will probably know what I mean when I say that Croydon has an identity problem. For some time now it has been the butt of jokes, regularly categorized in the press and media as the epitome of boring, faceless, soulless suburbia.” In surveys residents said they weren’t even sure it had any history. In fact, MacDonald’s team had such little faith in Croydon’s image that they actually planned to name the museum “Lifetimes” to prevent any negative associations with the Croydon name (since MacDonald's essay was published it has become the Museum of Croydon). MacDonald saw the new museum as playing a role in changing Croydon’s identity. She goes on to say, “what people and politicians wanted amounted to the same thing. Almost everybody desired a proposal that would put Croydon on the cultural map, though many believed this would be impossible. In order to do this, Croydon’s museum had to be new, different, modern, daring, high profile, glossy, sponsorable, and popular. It would be a symbol to help market Croydon to a hostile outside world.” The museum opened in 1995 and was scheduled for a major retool in 1999. I’m hoping to visit in July and see how it turned out.Back in February before I left the US I had an opportunity to hear Sheila Watson from the University of Leicester speak about her work developing museums for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, UK. A seaside town whose fishing industry collapsed in the 1960s, Great Yarmouth was experiencing high levels of unemployment and accompanying socio-economic problems by the 1990s. After extensive focus groups with residents, Watson worked with the local community on a series of local history initiatives, most notably a new museum about Great Yarmouth’s maritime heritage, Time and Tide, which opened in 2004 and was a finalist for European Museum of the Year in 2006. From the focus groups Watson learned that local residents saw Time and Tide as a vehicle for restoring some pride to Great Yarmouth. In fact, they told Watson’s team the goal should be a museum that would show up the more affluent nearby towns that had better reputations.I don’t believe that a museum can serve as a panacea, magically transforming places like Croydon and Great Yarmouth into somewhere that people want to live or visit. I subscribe to the Project for Public Spaces’ Power of 10 theory that you need 10 great places in a neighborhood, and 10 great neighborhoods in a city, before there’s a there, there. But I do think that a good museum is seen as a symbol of what’s going right in a community while a small-potatoes museum (or no museum at all) is a symbol of all the things that have fallen apart. I also believe that every place has history that matters, and that valuing a place’s history makes a statement that you value its people. Which has me wondering what role Detroit Historical Society is playing in that city’s much-publicized decline. Maybe DHS is just trying to keep its own head above water, but can it find a way to actively contribute to Detroit’s regeneration efforts, or must it settle for merely documenting the loss for posterity?
Hilda Kozari's Air
Sniff, Sniff
I spent Sunday afternoon at Kiasma, Helsinki’s contemporary art museum. There was a lot to love there. One installation in particular, by Hilda Kozári, was appropriate for this blog. It’s called Air. Kozari created three acrylic bubbles, each representing a different city: Helsinki, Budapest, Paris. She worked with Parisian perfume designer Bertrand Duchaufour to develop a scent for each city, which is then piped into the bubbles. You stand underneath and take in the smell. Film footage is projected onto the acrylic, creating ghost-like images that you can barely discern to go along with the wafting aroma. Kozári seemed to be making the point that sometimes we need our eyes to take a back seat and let our other senses lead. I experimented with historical city smells when I was working at the Old State House Museum in Boston. I created “smell stations” for things like the 1919 Molasses Flood, the Fire of 1711, and the original 17th-century town market that used to stand on the site of the Old State House. These smell stations are one of the most popular parts of the museum’s hands-on history exhibition. It was a challenge to come up with effective methods for harnessing the smells—not every scent that I wanted to include was feasible. I stuck to pure, one-note smells. It didn’t even occur to me to try a combination. I really like the idea of Kozári’s Air. But I have to admit that while all three bubbles did smell differently to me, I couldn’t have told you which one was which city if I hadn’t read it on the label. Kozári was going for a multi-note, complex scent, which meant that they all smelled manufactured, like perfume instead of natural odor. My cousin was with me, though, and she had lived in Paris for a semester as an undergrad. She identified the City of Lights immediately because its scent included roses, and therefore provoked a powerful sense memory of wandering the streets in spring. When I first moved to Helsinki it took me about a week to get used to the smell. It didn’t smell bad, just different. Sort of, well, cold. And (you’ll laugh) a little like beets. Now it just smells normal. And you, dear reader? What does your favorite city smell like?
City Branding
A tagline on the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau website reads: “America’s birthplace. History’s showcase. The past is present in Boston.” Meanwhile, Frommers.com calls Boston “relentlessly historic.” And Fodors.com says “to Bostonians, living in a city that blends yesterday and today is just another day in their beloved Beantown.” History is the core of Boston’s brand. Consequently, I have found it interesting to move to a city that doesn’t particularly consider itself historic. Turku maybe, but not Helsinki. A tagline on the City of Helsinki’s official tourism website reads “A little bit Eastern, a little bit Western—totally Finnish.” Frommers.com says Helsinkians are “the best educated, the best clothed, the best fed, and the best housed on earth.” And Fodors.com calls Helsinki “a city of the sea.” These websites all certainly refer to Helsinki’s past, particularly its past with Sweden and Russia, but they don’t describe it as an historic city. They focus instead on technology and design, the high quality of life, the water, the climate. History is not part of Helsinki’s brand. So this week I’ve been reading some of the branding literature, to see if anyone has anything significant to say about the impact of history on the perception of cities. I found a master’s thesis from Julia Winfield-Pfefferkorn that asserts that possessing a unique history helps a city build a successful global image; she cites New York and Paris as examples. I also found the 2008 Saffron European City Brand Barometer, which awards 20% of its “city asset strength” score based on “sightseeing and historical attractions” (Helsinki ranked 21 out of 72 cities). And in the introduction to the 2006 version of his famous Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, in which Boston ranked 23 and Helsinki 36 out of 60 cities, Simon Anholt says that city brands “are inextricably tied to the histories and destinies of all these places.” But history does not play a direct role in any of his six scoring components: presence, place, potential, pulse, people, and prerequisites (perhaps because it doesn’t start with P?). So far, none of this is overwhelming evidence. So far, I haven’t found anything that adequately delineates a link between history and brand. I wrote a few weeks ago about Boston’s preoccupation with the history of the American Revolution, and it’s clear that its identity as a historical city yields an enormous amount of tourism and global recognition. Every child in America knows Boston because they learn about it in their American history classes. The same can’t be said for, say, Austin or Phoenix. Boston makes a nice example, but I don’t necessarily think that a city needs to have a globally-recognized history in order to build a meaningful brand. I would like to see all cities develop a stronger sense of their own history, but not for the sake of branding. In fact, I think city branding is a tricky concept to begin with—Simon Anholt himself even says as much. What I really care about is not so much branding—how many people know about a city and where it falls on a ranking list—but whether a city’s history has an impact on the daily lives of its residents. Can public history strengthen the social fabric of the city and make people feel more connected to the place where they live? I fear that such a correlation will be difficult to substantiate, qualitatively or quantitatively. My next step is to look at visitor studies. In the meantime, any thoughts, residents of Blogosphere?
Checkpoint Charlie
The Only Game in Town
In mid-March I spent a week in Berlin, at a conference for Fulbright fellows from all over Europe. In between sessions I did some exploring: the city museum, the Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, and a strange, edutainment site called “The Story of Berlin. ”What that week showed me is that for Berlin history, there is only one game in town: the Wall. Pieces of the Wall are everywhere, and so is historical interpretation of the Wall—not just along its former route, but at Alexanderplatz near my hotel, and woven throughout the tour I took of the city’s modern architecture. Moreover, the history of the wall has been commodified—you can buy your own wall souvenir from street vendors, take a tour of underground escape routes, or pay some guy dressed as a soldier a few euro to stamp your passport and let you take a photo with him at Checkpoint Charlie. I know another town with only one game (okay, two if you count the Red Sox). In Boston, the only history that matters is the American Revolution. Tourists flock to the Freedom Trail, they take their photos with tour guides dressed in colonial costume, and they buy tricorn hats and Tea Party tea to take home to Indianapolis or Santa Fe or Tokyo. On one hand, Berlin and Boston are lucky to have these dominant stories (as much as one can call the Wall a stroke of luck). It’s wonderful that people are interested in some history, any history. At a time when visitation to art museums dwarfs that of history museums, the Freedom Trail is the largest tourist destination in New England. But as with most things in life, it’s a double-edged sword. For starters, having only one game widens the gap between tourists and residents. Sites like Checkpoint Charlie or the Boston Massacre become mobbed with map-toting, sneaker-wearing gawkers, and locals intuitively avoid them like the plague. The one game—whether it be the Wall or the Revolution—becomes something specifically for tourists, and locals turn away to look for other stories, for history only a longtime resident would know. This gap presents a dilemma for the city’s public historians. Do you focus your efforts on the tourists—the low-hanging fruit—or do you remain loyal to your local base, even if their interests are more diverse, and therefore more challenging to address? Or do you try to do it all, and perhaps spread yourself too thin in the process? And this hyper-commodification of history—how does it affect the work of public historians? I can say from personal experience that it becomes harder to find the line between quality historical site and tourist trap, and to stay on the right side of it. Particularly when it feels like lots of photo opps and a big gift shop with sort-of-historically-accurate bright and shiny things is simply giving the public what they want. Or, that if you don’t do it, someone else will. And lastly, does the only game in town help anyone—tourists or residents—truly understand and know these cities? Berlin is a city that is healing—physically, mentally, and economically. Boston is a proud city, a city that ended up on the right side of history. But that barely scratches the surface. They both have other stories too, and other identities. It’s okay to start with the Wall, just please let’s not end there too.