Another new museum? Imagining the space of art in the creative city

Abstract

With the transformation of urban governance into a mode of entrepreneurialism, museums have become prominent and privileged sites for reshaping cities as attractive places for cultural and artistic consumption. Using an ethnographic field study, the authors investigate how the logic of the creative city is at work in the planning of a new art museum in a medium-sized Swiss city. The analysis shows how the entrepreneurial rationale is contested and re-appropriated through the use of classic and situational modes to organize this cultural institution. The ways of imagining the museum are described as the effects of these three modes of ordering – entrepreneurial, classic, and situational – as well as their hybridization. The authors conclude that by attending to the multiple layers of urban life, which unfold in and around museums, we can imagine other ‘new museums’ than those of the entrepreneurial city.