Cities, Museums and Soft Power

by Gail Dexter Lord, Ngaire Blankenberg

Overview

Museum planners Gail Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg demonstrate how museums and cities are using their soft power to address some of the most important issues of our time.Soft power is the exercise of influence through attraction, persuasion, and agenda-setting rather than military or economic coercion.Thirteen of the world's leading museum and cultural experts from six continents explore the many facets of soft power in cities and museums to include: how it amplifies civic discourse, accelerates cultural change, and contributes to contextual intelligence among the great diversity of city dwellers, visitors, and policy makers. The authors urge city governments to embrace museums which so often are the signifiers of their cities, increasing real estate values while attracting investment, tourists, and creative workers. Lord and Blankenberg propose 32 practical strategies for museums and cities to activate their soft power and create thriving and sustainable communities.

Follow the link below to watch co-author Gail Lord speaking about soft power on The Agenda, a popular public affairs program on TVO, a leading educational television broadcaster http://tvo.org/video/programs/the-agenda-with-steve-paikin/a-cultural-sleeping-giant.

To Read More: http://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/shared-values/how-museums-help-cities-realize-their-soft-power

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442276772
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/08/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Gail Dexter Lord is co-founder and co-president of Lord Cultural Resources. With Barry Lord, she is co-editor of The Manual of Museum Planning (1991, 1999, 2012), and co-author of The Manual of Museum Management (1997 and 2009) and Artists, Patrons and the Public: Why Culture Changes (2010). She is co-author with Kate Markert of The Manual of Strategic Planning for Museums (2007). Gail has led cultural and tourism plans for cities as well as planning, management and exhibition assignments for museums, galleries and cities throughout Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, North America and Asia. In 2014, Gail was appointed Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the minister of culture of France.

Ngaire Blankenburg is a principal consultant at Lord Cultural Resources. She has been a youth worker, jazz poet, cartoonist, documentary maker and television producer. She directed the award-winning documentary Morris Fynn Goes Native (SABC), was co-director of Nkosi’s Mission (SABC/BBC) and is co-founder of the Museum of AIDS in Africa. She has advised museum and cultural clients in Washington, DC; Patna, India; Dhahran, Dubai; Beijing, China; and Sydney. Ngaire grew up in Winnipeg, Harare, and Christchurch, and has lived and worked in Johannesburg, Toronto, Paris and Barcelona.

Read an Excerpt

Cities, Museums and Soft Power

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By Gail Dexter Lord, Ngaire Blankenberg

The AAM Press

Copyright © 2015 Gail Dexter Lord Ngaire Blankenberg
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4422-7677-2

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why Cities, Museums and Soft Power

Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blakenberg

NGAIRE BLANKENBERG

My trip to Dubai this time is different. Rather than stay in one of the chilly, mega-brand hotels surrounded by building cranes, I'm in a small boutique art hotel in the Al-Fahidi Historical District, a historic Persian neighborhood that has recently been assigned a new Arabic name. This little network of shops and galleries is within the Historic District of Dubai, also called Khor Dubai, as part of a project to transform the ancient Khor (Arabic for creek) area to qualify for designation as a UNESCO world heritage site.

In my new location, I do what I rarely do in Dubai. I walk outside.

In the textile souk, the South Asian sales people first call out in French to entice me into their shops. "C'est jolie," they say. "Entrez!" I am flattered that they think I am French, despite the decidedly unfashionable rivulets of sweat creeping down my back. They try to capture my attention. "Mary!" they call out. "Eveline!" "Shakira!" I can't help laughing at these names, evidence of a growing globalization. "Ah, my friend — a beautiful pashmina. Silk. Come in. Just to look." Dubai, like many cities around the world and particularly those in the global South, has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last 75 years. In the 1930s, it was a small village of about 20,000 people, desperate to recover from the collapse of the pearl trade.

GAIL DEXTER LORD

My trip to Winnipeg this time is different. It is neither 25 degrees below zero, nor 30 degrees above, as on so many occasions over the past 14 years. It is a drizzling autumn day at "The Forks," for thousands of years a historic meeting place for indigenous people on the banks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. Now it is a popular mixed-use leisure and cultural park with theaters, retail shops and space for festivals, concerts, skateboarding and pow-wows. Today is different because I'm not here just for meetings. I'm here to visit the world's first national museum dedicated to human rights, on its first day open to the public.

Today will change this city for decades to come. As home to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg has decided to rebrand itself as "The City of Human Rights Education." Even before it opened, the museum operated a successful summer school in human rights education for teachers from across Canada, broadcast a lecture series called "Fragile Freedoms," featuring some of the world's most famous human rights experts, and trained a remarkable 350 volunteers. The nearby University of Manitoba maintains the archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the official enquiry into 200 years of abuse suffered by Canada's indigenous people as governments colluded with churches to forcibly remove children from their families and place them in faraway "residential schools" with the stated purpose "to kill the Indian in the child." Becoming the Human Rights Education City is a bold move and a challenging one: Winnipeg is also home to a large population of marginalized aboriginal people.

The museum looks as if a giant space ship has landed. As I enter with hundreds of proud and excited people, we are dazzled by the architecture, which takes us on a one-kilometer human rights journey along alabaster ramps. At each exhibition zone, friendly docents explain the history of human rights, indigenous perspectives, the Holocaust and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. People here assume I'm another visitor from Winnipeg, not the consultant from Toronto who for the past 14 years helped plan this museum.

I reflect on my Aunt Millie who lived in Winnipeg. She was the founder of the Nellie McClung Theatre Group, named for a famous suffragette. I remember my father's stories of how cold he felt selling newspapers at the corner of "Portage and Main," the crossroads of two economies — bootlegging liquor to the US during Prohibition and the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.

After many decades in decline, Winnipeg has transformed itself into a regional center for the knowledge economy, with universities, insurance firms, medical research, and a thriving arts and theater scene. Now it's part of an international network of cities that feature museums of conscience, collecting the stories behind human rights. Winnipeg and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are now ready to exercise their soft power.

Today the lure of gold brings almost 11 million people a year to the sky-piercing high-rises along these reclaimed shores. Laborers and domestic workers chase work they can't find at home, service workers and entrepreneurs look for new horizons, investors capitalize on the boom and the postboom. Consultants and advisors and tourists come for the air conditioned shopping, good hotels and great food at every price point. We all arrive through one of the world's busiest and best airports to discover a city full of promise and optimism.

I stroll through the perfume souk, the spice souk, the utensils souk, all active working markets, noisy with the loading and unloading of goods from Iran, South Korea and Singapore, the insistent sales pitches, the bargaining, the traffic. I reflect on what museums need to achieve for their clients, the government agencies and the varied residents of this burgeoning city-state. What could museums or a heritage district offer for Dubai's permanent, temporary and transitory residents, many of whom either do not know about museums and heritage sites or think of them as places for "others" in distant countries?

What good is a museum or heritage site in this city of gold, driven by development and aspiration, where history is for some just another word for outdated, while for others it is so deeply personal and familial that it has no place in the public realm?

Power.

Funny enough, it is the same for both the city and its residents. A museum here can confer power on the city's residents, and power on the city's government, at home and internationally.

Museums empower. Museums are power. Soft power.

Museums and cities throughout the world are connecting in a soft power embrace.

Soft power is a concept that emerged a quarter century ago to describe international relations based not on military nor economic might, but on influence. Soft power is the ability to influence behavior using persuasion, attraction or agenda setting. Where the resources of "hard power" are tangible — force and finance — soft power resources are intangibles, such as ideas, knowledge, values and culture. Networks and connectivity enable soft power to spread its influence farther and deeper via Web-based networks and networks of cities. And where there are cities, there are museums.

Political scientist Joseph Nye, who first formulated the term in 1990, recently explained how soft power has increased dramatically in the 21st century as the Information Revolution helped to distribute information of all kinds worldwide. In 2000 there were 5 million websites in the world; today there are more than 1 billion, and more than a third of the global population is online. As a result, more people participate in international conversations that were once the exclusive domain of states and corporations that had the economic and military power to exercise control. Today information can be launched, exchanged and turned into action more quickly, less expensively, and among more people and organizations than ever before in the history of humankind.

Monocle Magazine and the UK-based Institute of Government have rated countries on their soft power since 2011, using metrics such as the number of embassies and cultural missions, tourists per year, annual attendance at major art galleries, number-one albums internationally, number of foreign correspondents, UNESCO world heritage sites, think tanks, universities in the top 200, foreign students, restaurants with Michelin stars and even the number of footballers playing abroad in the world's best leagues. When aggregated, these indicators are thought to predict how influential a country might be in persuading others to agree with it.

The British Council identifies the link between soft power and culture in its 2013 report, Influence and Attraction: Culture and the Race for Soft Power in the 21st Century. Its focus, like Monocle's, is on civil society institutions, such as broadcasting and educational institutions, NGOs, businesses, foundations and trusts, and creative individuals — philanthropists, artists, sports personalities and performers. "Cultural contact had originally been elite-to-elite (through royal courts and ambassadors), then additionally elite-to-many (via broadcasting and cinema), and now was entering a phase of people-to-people (through travel, migration and the Internet).

Michele Acuto, senior lecturer in global networks and diplomacy at University College, London, argues that not only national governments but also cities exercise effective soft power through international cultural relations and cultural diplomacy, especially in the environment, migration and quality of life. Nye points out that the most effective soft power is generated by civil society rather than government and large corporations, which are the traditional backers of "hard power." When governments try to generate influence, it is often perceived as propaganda.

These twin characteristics of soft power — the rise of cities and the role of civil society — are pushing museums from the margins toward the center of soft power.

In the not-too-distant past, museums and the arts were mainly impacted by hard power, which is where their funding and governance originated. National governments of all types and large private corporations were the main patrons. They exercised influence, both directly and indirectly, on what museums displayed and collected and how they presented their material. During the Cold War, for example, the CIA, in its propaganda war against communism at home and abroad, secretly financed abstract expressionist exhibitions to promote the superiority of American freedom and creativity. In the more distant past, museums were repositories for war trophies, whether acquired from internal wars of aggression against indigenous people or other marginalized religious and ethnic communities, or from external conflicts and colonial conquest. In the museum setting, these trophies became objects of curiosity, displayed to communicate ideas about power and the hierarchy of "civilizations," so that there would be no doubt about the justice of "our empire" or the superiority of "our civilization." The objects that had been gifts between rulers somehow validated the notion of high cultural achievement among civilizations that had diplomatic relations. Natural history museums established a scientific standard for displaying collections in a systematic way that would soon be employed by museums of anthropology and ethnography. Art museums organized their galleries by country and school, such as "Northern Renaissance" or "Italian School," as though the political reality of ever-changing borders (and accompanying bloodshed) were somehow transcended by the glory of art.

Whether we date museums from the cathedral vault or the princely schatzkammer, from the great 18th-century universal collections or from childhood memories of geological wonders and terrifying dinosaurs, museums have always been powerful public spaces where the leading ideas of the time were presented. These ideas were often defined by the museum's dominant patrons, based on study of the objects that they collected and preserved. The ideas represented aren't always good ideas. Sometimes they are very bad ideas indeed, like eugenics and imperialism and man's "natural mastery" over nature. Nonetheless museums are places where ideas are openly presented and contested — and have been for hundreds of years.

Now museums are in a process of transformation from government and private organizations to institutions of civil society. By civil society we mean the network of organizations that represent neither big government nor large corporations, but have their roots in the voluntary and nonprofit sectors — often referred to as the "third sector" of the economy. This transformation started in the United States, which has been highly innovative in creating and sustaining the voluntary, nonprofit sector. The voluntary sector has been the cultural ethos of American democracy from its earliest days. In the last 40 years, economic changes such as the increasing concentration of wealth in private hands have stimulated the growth of civil society institutions worldwide. According to economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, the nonprofit economy is growing faster than the for-profit economy in many countries. More and more museums are being shifted from the governmental and corporate sectors to the nonprofit sector. This shift in patronage has led to new governance structures that reflect a plurality of voices and influences. As a consequence of their place in civil society, museums are finding themselves with new roles, responsibilities and expectations.

As government financing decreases both proportionately and in absolute numbers, the museum sector has become more dependent on new forms of patronage from foundations, philanthropists, sponsorship and earned sources. This has resulted in a change from inward-looking, collection-focused institutions to outward-facing, donor- and visitor-focused ones. This generational change occurred in two stages, and this book proposes that they are about to undergo a third — becoming centers of soft power.

The first stage was heralded by the American Association of Museums in 1992 when it released its landmark report, Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. This led to a fundamental change in the museum profession: museums proclaimed their roles as educational institutions with a mandate to provide physical and intellectual access for the entire public. This expanded "museum idea" echoed the 1986 ICOM definition of museums as institutions "for the public benefit" and coincided with legislation in the US and many other countries guaranteeing equal access for persons with disabilities. Over several decades, museum educators were liberated from their gloomy basement classrooms to take a central role in teams identifying the main messages of an exhibition, editing and rewriting text panels, selecting artifacts and communicating with stakeholders. A new emphasis on evaluation accompanied this transformation. Museum educators, like their colleagues in schools, colleges and universities, were passionate about measuring their success in sharing knowledge. It was no longer enough for an exhibition to be "beautiful" or "original" or "steeped in research," much to the discomfort of some curators and designers. Museums needed to be broadly educational and attract the full diversity of the public — whether or not these visitors had prior subject-matter expertise.

The second transformation followed within a decade of Excellence and Equity. It can best be characterized as "Experience and Branding." From within the museum sector, there was a strong impetus to expand and intensify the impact that museums were having on the public. Books like The Experience Economy argued that people were no longer buying products but rather experiences. Museum professionals knew that they provided experiences in their galleries and programs. Now these experiences needed to be enhanced and packaged — packaged through branding.

The branding of museums started as an extension of the traditional strategic planning process (itself adapted from the corporate world) of communicating the mission of the museum. The brand, which is said to be the "promise of the product," further reinforces the consumer character of the museum experience. And like a consumer brand, it helps people find the product, physically and virtually.

Museums suddenly had a new importance in the city. They were contemporary landmarks. Not only brands in and of themselves, but also incorporated into the brand of the city. Museums were now seen as an integral part of the promise of their cities.

In 2000, the opening of Tate Modern in London was seen as a triumph of branding. Tate became synonymous with London as the capital of "Cool Britannia."

This dynamic combination of experience and brand became the foundation for a consumer boom in museums, helping to overcome some of the marketing defects from which museums have suffered: for example, that the permanent collection will "always be there," so there is no urgency to visit. The big experience — whether it is the "Rain Room" or "The Treasures of King Tut" — is time bound. You need to consume it during the limited time it is there, in your city or on your screen.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cities, Museums and Soft Power by Gail Dexter Lord, Ngaire Blankenberg. Copyright © 2015 Gail Dexter Lord Ngaire Blankenberg. Excerpted by permission of The AAM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Why Cities, Museums and Soft Power
Gail Dexter Lord & Ngaire Blankenberg

2. The Economics of Museums and Cities
Javier Jimenez

3. Museums in Public Diplomacy
Federica Olivares

4. London’s Knowledge Quarter: The Soft Power of Museums in the Knowledge Economy and Urban Development
Baillie Card

5. Museums in the Age of Brazilian Soft Power
Gege Leme Joseph

6. Museums as Signifiers in the Gulf
Hayfa Matar

7. When Soft Powers Collide
Ngaire Blakenberg

8. Unearthing the Genius Loci of Museums in the Indian Subcontinent
Batul Raaj Mehta

9. Cultural Nomads: Creative People on the Road
Robert Punkenhofer

10. Cranking Up the Soft Power Engine of Chinese Museums
An Laishun, PH.D

11. A Tale of Two Civil and Human Rights Cities
Gail Dexter Lord and Joy Bailey Bryant

12. Cairo and Its Museums: From Multiculturalism to Leadership in Sustainable Development
Mohamed Gamal Rashed

13. Global and Local: Fairs and Biennials, Temporary Urbanism and Pop-Up Museums
Lourdes Fernandez with translation by Marina Ramirez

14. The Museum Building Boom
Guido Guerzoni

15. Thirty-two Ways for Museums to Activate Their Soft Power
Ngaire Blakenberg and Gail Dexter Lord

Editorial Reviews

Cities, Museums and Soft Power provides a fascinating and multifaceted analysis of a theme that is intrinsically linked to UNESCO’s convictions on the influential role of culture and creativity in promoting social inclusion, understanding, and economic growth. Through its thought-provoking and informative essays, the book provides insight into the transformation of museums landscapes in all regions, against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, competition for tourists, talent, and influence. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in culture, creative cities, and the creative economy.

Irina Bokova

“Cities, Museums and Soft Power is a must-read for museum leaders who grapple with their institution's role in building cultural infrastructure locally or globally. Readable, instructive, and compelling, this book builds the case for museums as strong society-minded networks that can deftly employ soft power to accelerate cultural change and empower citizens at home or around the world.

Melody Kanschat

The authors build a compelling argument as they explore what’s next for cities, museums, and soft power, framing the international conversation about the future in fresh and provocative ways. A fascinating book.

James Richardson

In this important and timely book, Gail Dexter Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg have brought together an innovative array of essays that not only answer the perennial question of why museums matter, but also suggest a blueprint for how museums can exercise more influence and be of greater value to their urban communities. This is a must-read for those who care about culture, museums, and the evolution of our communities in the century.

Lonnie G. Bunch

The authors build a compelling argument as they explore what's next for cities, museums, and soft power, framing the international conversation about the future in fresh and provocative ways. A fascinating book.

Jim Thompson