Traditionally, city museums have been keepers of city history. Many have been exercises in nostalgia, reflecting city pride. However, a new generation of museums focuses increasingly on the city's present and future as well as its past, and on the city in all of its diversity, challenges, and possibilities. Above all, these museums are gateways to understanding the city—our greatest and most complex creation and the place where half the world's population now lives. In this book, experts in the field explore this 'new' city museum and the challenge of contributing positively to city development.

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

This final report describes the goals, pilot partnerships, and results of the Museums in the Life of a City Initiative. This project was established to enhance the appreciation of cultural diversity by building partnerships between museums and communities.

Offering a cross section of hidden infrastructure, this title uses innovative graphic images and clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city and the people who support them.

The contributions in this collection offer a wide range of stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment, by focusing on a variety of text-types ranging from poetry, the Bible, fictional and non-fictional prose, to newspaper articles, condo names, online texts and exhibitions. Employing both established and cutting-edge methodologies from, among others, corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, Text World Theory and ecostylistics, the eleven chapters in the volume provide an overview of how landscape, place and environment are encoded and can be investigated in literary and non-literary discourse. The studies collected here stand as evidence of the possibility of, and the need for, a “stylistics of landscape”, which emphasises how represented spaces are made manifest linguistically; a “stylistics of place”, which focuses on the discursive and affective qualities of those represented spaces; and a “stylistics of environment”, which reiterates the urgency for environmentally-responsible humanities, able to support a change in the anthropocentric narrative which poses humans as the most important variable in the human-animal and human-environment relationships.

Recent decades have seen migration history and issues increasingly featured in museums. Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration. It presents the latest innovative research from academics and museum practitioners and offers a comparative perspective on a global scale bringing to light geo- and socio-political specificities. It includes an extensive range of international contributions from Europe, Asia, South America as well as settler societies such as Canada and Australia. Museums and Migration charts and enlarges the developing body of research which concentrates on the analysis of the representation of migration in relation to the changing character of museums within society, examining their civic role and their function as key public arenas within civil society. It also aims to inform debates focusing on the way museums interact with processes of political and societal changes, and examining their agency and relationship to identity construction, community involvement, policy positions and discourses, but also ethics and moralities.

In this book, experts in the field explore the 'new' city museum, examining the role of the city museum in urban development, the problems posed in dealing with contemporary history, and the impact of intangible heritage on the work of city museums.

This book offers theoretical and practical insights into land use, transport, and national policies in one of world’s well-known urban concrete jungle, none other than the Singapore city. The emphasis is situated on Singapore’s attempt to promote walking and cycling. Greater appreciation of walkability thrives on Singapore’s rich history, green city, people and the gastronomic kopitiam and hawker culture. The book offers a comprehensive coverage of walkability as a crucial component of urban design to reduce vehicular congestion with the associated carbon emissions, foster a healthy lifestyle and community participation and create jobs to help the economy. A high income per capita and an aging society, lessons drawn from Singapore’s experience will be useful to other societies. Scholars in sustainable tourism field, urban planners, government bodies, tourist boards, entrepreneurs, national parks board, residents, and inbound travellers will benefit from reading the book.