City Museums in Transition: A European Overview

The essay explores if and how city museums are reacting to the challenges and changes posed by what the MeLa project defines as “an age of migrations.” (the notion of “migration” is adopted by the Project as a paradigm of the contemporary global and multicultural world. The chapter develops around some main research questions, investigating the role that city museums can play within a changing urban context, how they deal with the growing heterogeneity of the city’s population ensuing from contemporary mobility and migration fluxes, and how their role and this context influences their strategies and narratives, in order to eventually examine how their communication tools, spaces and exhibition design might consequently change and contribute to the effectiveness of the museum’s mission. It thus aims at outlining possible developments, cues for reflection and fields to be further investigated