ancient cities

536 Museums
posited an even bleaker world outlook in which
scientific and military leaders were conspiring to
bring civilization to its untimely end. In his view,
Eutopia, the good place, would inevitably be
bested by Utopia, the perfect place. Still, Mumford
did not relinquish his faith in the ability of humankind
to renew itself.
Were Mumford alive today, he would undoubtedly
be in the forefront of the sustainability and
green movements, advocating cleaner power,
organic farming, and wilderness protection. To his
small, somewhat isolated farmhouse, he would
likely have welcomed the Internet and the television
satellite, even as he would likely have cursed
the superabundance of misinformation they sometimes
deliver. Last, he would almost certainly be
urging his readers to learn from their collective
past while taking control of their present and
future: to let shared human values guide their
hopes and dreams rather than the machine and its
empty materialistic promises.
See also Geddes, Patrick; Intellectuals; Utopia
Further Readings
Robert Wojtowicz
Miller, Donald L. 1989. Lewis Mumford: A Life. New
York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Renewal of Life. Vol. 2, The
Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
———. 1945. City Development: Studies in Disintegration
and Renewal. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
———. 1961. The City in History: Its Origins, Its
Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World.
———. 1982. Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of
Lewis Mumford, The Early Years. New York: Dial
Press.
Wojtowicz, Robert. 1996. Lewis Mumford and American
Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and
Urban Planning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
MU s e U M s
The museum has been bound up with the emergence
of urban civic cultures over the last two centuries.
This entry looks at the emergence of the
civic, metropolitan, and postmodern museum complexes,
with the latter in the context of urban renewal
initiatives, and examines how museums are embedded
in cities and what urban cultures they support.
It draws in the wider development of museum and
preserved districts—as in the museum-ification of
parts of cities. It connects the changing ways the
world is presented in museums with our understandings
of the world and the museum as a technology
of cultural governance in the city.
The Birth of the Civic Museum
The modern civic museum emerged in the late
eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. It emerged
with the democratization of preservation from
royal collections and princely studiolo, wunderkamera
and cabinets of curiosities and their
replacement with public collections. Key moments
are often pointed to in different nations, be it Hans
Sloane’s donations initiating the British Museum
in 1754; the purchase of the Angerstine collection
of painting in 1824 to start London’s National
Gallery; James Smithson’s bequest to found the
Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1854; or the
postrevolutionary opening of royal collections
using the former palace of the Louvre in Paris.
Museums became vehicles for public education
and civic improvement. We might determine two
phases here, opening the collections and then
developing the museum as an architectural form to
house them. In terms of the latter, the nineteenth
century is marked by the creation of built forms
deemed able to carry through a civic mission.
Museums are technologies for producing social
effects, tools of governance that as Tony Bennett
argues operate in registers that are both civic and
epistemological. That is, museums organize objects
to be viewed and at the same time they organize
the viewing public. Where formerly the intended
viewer saw through the eyes of the monarch and
the museum thus encoded royal power, civic
arrangements created the viewer as the urban public.
Museums helped create a sense of shared
views on the world and knowledge about the
world. They worked to categorize and order
the world, positioning object and self in the
rapidly changing world of the modern city.
Museum displays deployed categorizations and
classifications of objects in ways that appeared
to convey universal secular truths. The typologies