City Museum Smart City

Museum Management and Curatorship
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmmc20
City museums in the age of datafication: could

museums be meaningful sites of data practice in
smart cities?
Natalia Grincheva
To cite this article: Natalia Grincheva (2022): City museums in the age of datafication: could
museums be meaningful sites of data practice in smart cities?, Museum Management and
Curatorship, DOI: 10.1080/09647775.2021.2023904
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2021.2023904
Published online: 24 Jan 2022.
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MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP
https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2021.2023904
City museums in the age of datafication: could museums be

meaningful sites of data practice in smart cities?
a,b
Natalia Grincheva
a
Department of Media, National Research University “The Higher School of Economics”, Moscow, Russia;
b
School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The article documents connections and synergies between city Received 10 August 2021
museums’ visions and programming as well as emerging smart Accepted 26 December 2021
city issues and dilemmas in a fast-paced urban environment
KEYWORDS
marked with the processes of increasing digitalization and City museum; smart city;
datafication. The research employs policy/document analysis and Open Data; Singapore City
semi-structured interviews with smart city government Gallery; Museum of London;
representatives and museum professionals to investigating both Museum of the City of New
smart city policy frameworks as well as city museum’s data-driven York
installations and activities in New York, London and Singapore. A
comparative program analysis of the Singapore City Gallery,
Museum of the City of New York and Museum of London
identifies such sites of data practices as Data storytelling,
interpretation and eco-curation. Discussing these sites as
dedicated spaces of smart citizen engagement, the article reveals
that city museums can either empower their visitors to consider
their roles as active city co-makers or see them as passive
recipients of the smart city transformations.
Introduction
As public hubs for constituting citizenry (Bennett 1995), museums have established their
important role in shaping cultural and political discourses, educating citizens and elevat-
ing feelings of local belonging (Wallis 1994; Poulot 1997; Luke 2002). Especially, city
museums have been recognized as prominent contributors to the curation and circulation
of urban representations and narratives of the city’s cultural and political landscapes (Silva
2012). Calabi (2012) defined a city museum as an institution that does not necessarily have
to deal with art masterpieces, ‘but with multiple stories about local communities, spaces
and buildings where people live, move, play, go to school or to work’ (458). Gosselin
(2013) further explained that city museums exist ‘to respond to global problems by pro-
posing local solutions’ in developing new models of economic, environmental and cul-
tural sustainability (21).
In the beginning of the twentieth century, with the growth of urban centres and pro-
liferation of museums as public institutions, civic museums spread across all European
countries. They primarily aimed to consolidate collections of objects whose different
CONTACT Natalia Grincheva grincheva@gmail.com School of Culture and Communication, The University of
Melbourne, Digital Studio, Melbourne 3010, Australia
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 N. GRINCHEVA
origins represented urban centres where they were located (Tewdwr-Jones et al. 2020).
While the mission of these civic museums in the early years was mainly educational, in
the 1970s with the development of new museology movement city museums expanded
their goals to enhance citizen engagement in co-developing narratives of urban life
(Vergo 1997). A new social constructivist model of a museum as a social ‘forum’ prioritized
personal experiences of the audiences treated as active meaning-makers (Hooper-Green-
hill 2000):
‘Less interested in a top-down knowledge production and delivery model, institutions practi-
cing civic museography,’ or city museums, progressively started to design interactive visitor
opportunities to engage audiences in urban narratives co-creation (Gosselin 2013, 21). In the
past decades, many city museums across countries and continents have experimented with
programming that engaged visitors in debates on a wide range of urban issues, including
environmental, health, diversity and inclusion, architecture and design, scientific and techno-
logical progress, economic development, or political mobilization (Ünsal 2019; Black 2010;
Smith 2009). This article explores how city museums have expanded their curatorial and rep-
resentation agenda in the raise of smart cities, especially in light of increasing datafication
processes transforming the urban life.
This article defines smart cities as densely networked and connected urban centres that
employ smart infrastructures and data-driven solutions to enable urban governance that
supports knowledge-sharing and encourages civic participation (Kitchin 2014). From e-
government systems to city dashboards, to digital surveillance and to sensor networks,
to name but a few, a wide range of smart city platforms generate a vast amount of
data. These data uniquely connect people, objects, and urban spaces and can be repur-
posed for predictive profiling, social sorting of citizens and communities as well as for
creating urban models and simulations (Kitchin 2014). Data-driven solutions promise
cities a new level of urban design and transparency enabling a more efficient manage-
ment of the city environment, security, economic sustainability and even cultural vitality
(O’Connor and Andrejevic 2017).
However, it remains questionable what data are included in and excluded from a smart
city data ecology and what purposes do they serve, ‘not simply from an instrumental per-
spective […] but with respect to issues such as fairness, equity, justice, citizenship, democ-
racy and governance?’ (Kitchin et al. 2017b, 2). Developing a more democratic, inclusive
and human-centred environment is a growing need in the development of agenda of
smart cities. Academic scholarship has criticized smart cities for exacerbating digital
divides, increasing inequalities, disadvantaging poorer citizens and creating power asym-
metries within and among cities (Ryan and Gregory 2019). Smart city datafication created
new threats of ‘algorithmizing’ different areas of human life and intended to maximize
economic benefits rather than to increase social justice (O’Neil 2016). Excess control,
loss of privacy and decision-making powers as well as algorithm bias leading to social
exclusion decrease the role of citizens in managing a smart city that can benefit not
only techno and corporate giants but also improve cultural communities (Calvo 2020).
This situation signals a growing necessity to find new ways to transform an increasing
‘dataveillance and geosurveillance’ into a meaningful way to empower citizens to take an
active role in co-design and transformation of the city into a comfortable space to live and
create (Kitchin 2015, 7). To explore the potentials of smart cities for productive commu-
nity-led co-design of innovative urban solutions, this article draws on the rationalistic
MUSEUM MANAGEMENT AND CURATORSHIP 3
or pragmatic school of thought that sees smart city building as primarily a smart citizen-
ship and community development activity rather than concentrating around ICTs or tech-
nology. The scholars in this school argue that the strengthening citizens’ digital skills and
enhancing communities’ capabilities lead to enhancing a meaningful usage of technol-
ogies, based on the need in the local contexts (add names). Bringing the human
element into the forefront, the school emphasizes the value of community-driven
smart open innovation models as a meta-factor that ‘should be the overarching goal of
smart city planning’ (Kummitha and Crutzen 2017, 46).
These innovation models are based on public-private-people partnerships, living labs
and e-governance systems that facilitate bottom-up interventions. They provide a
required collaborative innovation structure that connects smart government, research
institutions, companies, third-sector organizations and citizens to develop more inclusive,
higher quality and more efficient smart urban services (Errichiello and Micera 2018). For
example, de Waal et al. (2020a) identified the level of collectives that combine citizens
and other stakeholders mobilized by a third party that acts on their behalf around a par-
ticular issue. They indicate that, in the process of city-making, intermediaries or ‘urban
curators’ (Beer et al. 2015) can play an important role as initiators and facilitators (de
Waal et al. 2020a). Cultural institutions in particular have long been serving the society
by ‘organizing dramaturgies’ that activate citizens around urgent social and political
issues (Knoop and Schwarz 2017). As centers of expertise, such institutions as
museums, libraries, archives and institutes for education and research, are particularly
well placed to ‘operationalize the knowledge produced in hackable city-making’ (de
Waal et al. 2020a).
Specifically, as key community-oriented institutions, city museums can be a meaning-
ful part of smart city ecosystems who can educate, engage and empower smart citizens
to further democratize smart environments (Romanelli 2018). Bringing in citizens as
important stakeholders to the open innovation model, museums could play a funda-
mental role in nurturing a smart citizen, defined by Alexandru et al. (2019) as a
person who actively uses digital technologies to get involved in society, politics, and
governance to solve complex urban problems. The smart citizen is a new paradigm of
the concept of citizen by which human interactions within urban environments and
social intelligence serve as a key resource to be used to increase the quality of life (Alex-
andru et al. 2019).
For example, to augment public discourse and generate citizen-driven solutions to
contribute to the smart city co-making museums can offer sites of data practice.
According to Bates (2017), sites of data practice are dedicated spaces within a smart
city ecosystem, where different actors, from governments to citizen activist groups,
engage in various forms of data curation, circulation, analysis and meaning making.
They are based on interconnected networks that might include public bodies, regulat-
ory agencies, citizen-led communities, private companies, research centres, univer-
sities and museums. Different sites of data practices would have their own data
cultures and objectives regarding the opening and repurposing of public data.
These sites could perform various functions in the smart city development, ranging
from policymaking or urban research to open data network building and even data
activism and protest campaigns challenging municipal governments decisions and
practices (Bates 2017).
4 N. GRINCHEVA
The interdisciplinary academic scholarship across museology and urban studies

argued that museums as socially responsible urban actors can offer powerful spaces
for the generation, promotion and even legitimization of smart city narratives
(Estrada-Grajales et al. 2020). In relation to data practices, museums in a smart city
can generate urban imaginaries through technical and data-driven interventions (Ioan-
nidis et al. 2013; Giannini and Bowen 2019). More importantly, data-driven installations
in museums can engage citizens in the process of urban co-creation, transforming them
from passive urban residents to active data producers and narrators (Chronis 2012).
Estrada-Grajales et al. (2020) analysed the 100% Brisbane exhibition in the Museum of
Brisbane in Australia to argue that citizens can perform as ‘data sensors,’ capable of
reshaping their urban spaces and the narrative representations attached to those
spaces (333).
While the interdisciplinary scholarship exploring the role of museums in smart city is
slowly growing (Giannini and Bowen 2019), there have been no focused studies so far
that would explore specific cases of museums’ programs and installations that could be
understood as sites of data practices, especially in relation to smart city policy context.
As Bates (2017) indicated, each of such data practice sites is embedded within a wider
socio-material context and shaped by ‘public policy, legislation, political economy and
various other factors that inform and shape how ideas and practices emerge around
data’ (192). It is important, though, to explore further this assumption and investigate
links between urban policy making and city museum programs which could provide inter-
active spaces of data practice.
To address the research problem the article offers a comparative case analysis of data-
intensive programs developed by dedicated city museums in three selected cities, such as
London, Singapore and New York. The next section justifies and explains a cross-case
analysis employed in this research to explore if the Museum of London (MoL), Singapore
City Gallery (SCG) and Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) offer meaningful sites of
data practice in their respective smart cities. The following part briefly presents these
cases, identifying three types of data practices established in the museums, ranging
from data storytelling to eco-curation. The article proceeds with a more focused analysis
and discussion of the key research findings that are presented in two sections. The first
one explores how three city museums position themselves in relation to the smart city
agenda and how they conceptualize their institutional roles within their urban data ecol-
ogies. The second section assess to what extent city museums can provide engaging sites
of data practices by analysing how they understand citizens’ role in smart city co-making
and reflecting on the practical implications for museums in terms of their societal mission
in nurturing citizenship.
Research questions and methodology

Investigating both smart city policy frameworks as well as city museums data-driven
installations and activities in New York, London and Singapore, the article aims to
address the following key questions: How city museums understand their roles and place
in smart city ecosystems? If/how do smart city governments frame museum data practices
within their policy frameworks and agenda? And what roles are assigned to citizens in
these museums’ spaces of data practice?
To address these questions the article draws on a comparative analysis of three case
studies explored in the context of city museums and their data-inspired installations
and programs in such smart cities as London, New York and Singapore. All three cities
have been consistently analysed in the academic scholarship in relation to their smart
city governance, aspirations, programming, implementation challenges and technologi-
cal development (Shamsuzzoha et al. 2021, Csukas and Szabo 2021; Gonzaga 2019). Fur-
thermore, all three smart cities stress their commitments to citizen-centred policy
development aiming to provide adequate opportunities for public engagement in colla-
borative city co-design and management.
For example, Singapore Smart Nation plan outlines Digital Society, as one of its three
pillars of the smart development to ‘empower Singaporeans to maximize the opportu-
nities of a digital society, improve their lives, […] and have an equal chance to
succeed’ (SDGO 2020). In New York, 2018 NYCx programming as a part of the smart
city development plan focuses on involving neighborhoods and city communities ‘to
surface problems, co-create prototype solutions, and apply, test and grow emerging tech-
nologies’ (MOCTO 2018). Finally, aiming for a global ‘leadership in design and common
standards’ Smarter London Together Plan (2019) stresses its key goal to ‘put users at
the heart of what’ the city does by developing ‘new approaches to digital inclusion to
support citizens’ (16).
Considering that in recent years many smart city governments re-branded their endea-
vors and programs as citizen-centric without a real distribution of power to benefit smart
citizens (Kitchin 2015), it is important to consider the role of ‘intermediaries’ such as
museums to understand to what extent they can serve as safe and engaging places for
citizens to get involved into meaningful acts of data practice. This article explores
citizen-centred installations and activities closely engaging with urban data in three
smart cities in the context of such city museums as SCG, MoL and MCNY. As evidenced
in the article all these city museums have been very responsive to the smart city develop-
ment agenda and reflected on these urban transformations through their data-driven
programming and exhibitions.
These three case studies offered a culturally and geographically diverse research
sample for a close explorations of city museums’ initiatives in different economic and pol-
itical urban settings. The analysis of cases started with desk research based on document
analysis that accounted for two important sources of data: city museum programming
documentation and government policies. Extending the findings derived from the desk
research I conducted 8 focused semi-structured online interviews (facilitated through
Zoom) with both museum professionals and curators as well as with government
officials from selected museums and smart cities (see Table 1).
These interviews were instrumental to reveal complex relationships (or a lack of
thereof) between city museums and municipal authorities, that are not necessarily docu-
mented through direct policy incentives and explicitly articulated programs. More impor-
tantly, these interviews were particularly illuminating in explaining what roles these
museums have chosen in relation to engaging with urban data through their installations
and programming. Table 2 presents three data roles identified through the case analysis,
such as Data storytelling, Data interpretation and Data eco-curation and highlights some
key details on city museums’ exhibitions and installations which are further discussed
in the next section.
6 N. GRINCHEVA
Table 1. Museum professionals and government representatives from Singapore, New York and
London, interviewed by the author in March–April 2021.
Cited in text
City Interviewee Position and affiliation as
Singapore Anonymous Smart Nation Spokesperson, Smart National, Digital Government Office SMS 2021
Anonymous Senior Manager, Singapore City Gallery, Strategic Communications & SCG 2021
Outreach Department, Urban Redevelopment Authority
New York Sarah Henry Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Museum of the City of New York Henry 2021
Kubi Former Director of the Future City Lab, Museum of the City of New York Ackerman
Ackerman 2021
London Claire Assistant Director of Content, Museum of London Sussums
Sussums 2021
Sharon Director, Museum of London Ament 2021
Ament
Steve Watson Technical Building Lead, New Museum of London Watson 2021
Julia Smart Cities Policy Lead, Mayor of London Thomson
Thomson 2021
Table 2. Data-driven installations of the Singapore City Gallery, Museum of the City of New York, and
Museum of London as sites of data practices.
Site of data
Museum Data-driven installation practice Key functions
Museum of ‘The City is Ours’ & New Data eco- Storing, collecting, sharing, circulating,
London Museum of London curation analysing, and repurposing urban and
envisioned programming heritage data to generate innovations and
smart city solutions.
Museum of the The Future City Lab Data Exposing new meanings of urban data,
City of interpretation encouraging their re-interpretation
New York through artistic approaches, and
facilitating citizen feedback.
Singapore City ’Smart Nation CityScape’ Data storytelling Creatively representing urban data,
Gallery programs, and agenda to tell stories and
represent smart city narratives to educate
responsible and involved citizens.
Case studies: museums as cites of data practices

Singapore City Gallery: data storytelling through Smart Nation CityScape
Since its inception in January 1999, the Singapore City Gallery (SCG), existed under the
custodianship of Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), a statutory board
under the Ministry of National Development, that facilitates Singapore’s long term land
use and physical development. URA formulates strategic plans of the city to guide its
physical and spatial development and focuses ‘on achieving a quality living environment
for Singapore’ (URA 2020a). Formerly known as the URA Gallery, this three-storey visitor
centre, spanning 24,000 square meters, was devised as a showcase for the planning sol-
utions that URA had implemented to pursue national development. It offered a devoted
space in the city to explore its history and design its future (Lee 2014). The Gallery aims to
create ‘awareness and seeks the public’s understanding of Singapore’s unique constraints
and the solutions’ (Lim 1999).
Since its first days, the SCG has been on the Museum’s Roundtable, a Singapore associ-
ation of private and public museums, chaired by a representative from the National Heri-
tage Board. It shares with other museums its key goals and objectives to tell stories about
their communities, ‘however, not with a help of objects, but through representation of the
city design and development’ (SCG 2021). The gallery welcomes more than 200,000 visi-
tors a year to explore the Singapore’s development story, through public exhibits offering
multisensory experiences, including interactive installations, audio-visual narrations,
tactile encounters, 3D models and even participatory games (URA 2021).
Fully funded by the Communication and PR Department of the Government and
official representing its agenda, the programming of the SCG communicates the urban
policy to the public. It transmits a clear message of the Singapore government, stressing
the state’s vision of the city as a developed, vibrant and globally connected hub to live
and work (Glass 2018). Ho (2006) argued, that the SCG serves broader state narrative
efforts which stage Singapore as a ‘vibrant cosmopolis’ that builds on economic globali-
zation to offer a high quality of urban life to its residents. Mainly because the Singapore’s
development in the past decades ‘involved citizens trading democratic freedoms for com-
petent developmentalist governance’ (Vadaketh and Low 2014), URA seeks to reengage
Singapore’s citizens in the urban planning (Glass 2018, 237). As a part of these commit-
ments, the SCG runs multiple interactive exhibitions, including ‘How Our City Works,’
‘Shaping Singapore’ or ‘Mapping Singapore’ (URA 2021).
These installations engage citizens with urban data either by exhibiting Singapore
maps and plans for the last 40 years or exposing them to urban design challenges and
solutions through gaming. While sharing insights into the urban complexities, documen-
tation on decision-making choices and explanations of city transformations in the past
decades, the SCG aims to ‘tell stories not only through the prism of curation, but also
engaging people through interactive interfaces’ (SCG 2021). According to the Senior
Manager, the SCG aims for highly social experiences, as all their participatory games
and touchscreen interactives are designed for group activities to encourage socialization
within the gallery space.
In the past years, the programming of the SCG has been informed by the Smart City
policies (SCG 2021), especially in light of the Digital Society agenda of the Singapore
Smart Nation plan that has an ambition to ‘infuse digital literacy into national conscious-
ness’ (SNS 2020, 22). When the Smart Nation Plan was launched in 2016, there was ‘quite a
bit of push back from the public, especially from the older generations’ (SNS 2020). The
government was faced with a necessity to make the technology more accessible to all
generations as well as to demystify fears and misconceptions about digital technologies
and perceived threats around them. As a part of the movement under the Digital Society
agenda, in March 2021, the SCG installed ‘Smart Nation CityScape’ (SNS 2021). This inter-
active data-intense exhibition shares the story of Singapore digitalization and datafication
from the early days of the national computerization efforts to the proliferation of smart
solutions that exist today (SNS 2021).
With its strong focus on broadcasting of the smart city policy to a wider community
and its playful interactive design, the exhibition is an excellent example of the data prac-
tice that can be understood in terms of Data storytelling (see Table 2), an effective way to
communicate a large amount of information, tailored to a specific audience, with a com-
pelling narrative (Dykes 2019). Indeed, while being highly interactive and sharing a larger
amount of urban data, the exhibition primarily aims to translate the Singapore Smart
Nation plan into meaningful stories and share them with wider communities. According
to the Smart Nation spokesperson, the CityScape exhibition was the first attempt of the
8 N. GRINCHEVA
government to communicate to Singaporeans in its three stages outreach plan that also
aspires to further develop citizens engagement sessions at the Science Centre Singapore
and road shows across local communities. By contrast to two other practice sites’ ideas,
the CityScape installation was designed primarily as ‘an informational showcase with a
broad view about different policy initiatives to demonstrate what we do as a smart
nation’ (SMS 2021). Covering up to seven different areas which demonstrate how smart
city impacts residents from security concerns to environmental issues, the Cityscape
walks visitors through the smart city’s recent transformations, sharing stories about a
new urban life and about its future (SNS 2021).
Museum of the City of New York: interpreting data through the Future City Lab
Founded in 1923, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), was the first museum in
the United States to commit ‘to the study and interpretation of a single city’ (Henry 2018,
63). It received the land from the city government on Fifth Avenue on 103rd-104th Streets
and the property construction was completed by 1932. During the next few decades, the
Museum collected more than 750,000 unique objects, ranging from prints and photo-
graphs to sculpture and theatrical memorabilia (MCNY 2021). The museum is part of
the New York Cultural Institutions Group that consists of 34 private non-profit organiz-
ations, occupying city-owned buildings. The City offers them operating, capital and
energy support, while these privately managed organizations provide ‘cultural services
and programs to the people of New York’ (CIG 2021). Annually, the museum budget is
dependent on no more than 10% of the funding received from the Department of Cultural
Affairs of the City Government (MCNY 2016, 2018, 2019).
In 2016 the MCNY completed a decade-long $97 million physical modernization
project, followed by the creation of the first permanent exhibition ‘New York at Its
Core’ (Henry 2018). The largest of its gallery is the signature Future City Lab that delivers
creative design games, animated maps and dynamic data visualizations tools. These
interactive installations aim to empower audiences to invent new solutions to
imagine the city’s future (MCNY 2017). ‘The exhibition captures the pulse of the city’
and offers ‘artistic interpretations of New York’s diverse subcultures, street life and
the sometimes invisible but prevalent patterns of city living’ (Shalant 2016). In past
several years, the Lab ran three Program Series: ‘New York’s Future in a Changing
Climate’ (2017–2018), ‘Housing Tomorrow’s City’ (2018–2019) and ‘Garbage, Garbage
Everywhere!’ (2019–2020) exploring critical issues of housing, rising waters and pol-
lution and their impacts on the urban future.
Aspiring to offer a citizen engagement space for interpretation of urban data, the
Future City Lab, served as a dedicated city hub where interested citizens could play
with the Open Data to reimagine the future of NYC. These activities of the Lab
matched the objectives of One NYC 2050 Smart City Plan that outlined Thriving Neighbor-
hoods as one of its 8 key goals. It aims to advance citizens’ shared responsibility for com-
munities’ co-development and facilitate community planning and strategies (NYG 2019,
15). The Lab tasked itself to transform ordinary museum visitors into active planners
and decision-makers involved in solving various urban problems. ‘The real experts on
the future of New York are New Yorkers,’ the Future City Lab Director stressed, ‘people
decisions can determine what kind of city this is in the future’ (Shalant 2016).
While the Lab offered access to NYC Open data, it primarily aimed to provide a site
for Data interpretation (see Table 2), a dedicated space where data could be explained
artistically and tell human stories about numbers, demonstrating the value, meaning
and beauty of statistics. As the Director further explained the Lab aimed to celebrate
an important ‘civic engagement momentum,’ serving as a deliberation space for citi-
zens to discuss the past, the present and the future of NYC (Ackerman 2021). Challen-
ging the aspirations of the Open Data movement, Ackerman (2021) further pointed out
that making municipal data publicly available was not enough, ‘because it’s far from
self-exploratory and it can’t speak for itself.’ In order to make data meaningful, citizens
need to learn how to objectify data, how to reveal hidden methodological biases or
data inequities, how to translate mere quantitative information into qualitative
experiences.
Following its key mission to dedicate itself to the ‘interpretation of a single city’ (Henry
2018, 63), the MCNY explicitly identified its role in relation to the urban data practice ‘to
spur the imagination, start conversations and empower visitors to feel a sense of agency’
(MCNY 2017). The Data Lab was designed to enable a meaningful ‘interpretation of urban
data to facilitate a public co-creation of big narratives’ (Ackerman 2021). ‘The museum
role is an interpreter, not an access provider,’ the Lab Director stressed. Offering new
qualitative imaginative experiences around data was a primary objective that the
museum aimed to achieve when inviting citizens to its data installation.
Museum of London: eco-curating smart city data

The Museum of London (MoL) is known as the largest urban history museum in the world
(Swain 2002). The museum was first created by the Corporation of London back in 1826.
The original museum housed a large archaeological collection of discoveries from Roman
and medieval times that later on was united with the collections from the Guildhall
Museum to give birth to a new dedicated city museum (Hayes 1991). The MoL was estab-
lished by act of Parliament in 1965 to preserve and represent the city history from prehis-
toric to the present times (Lewis 2014). Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year (ALVA
2021), the MoL is publicly funded from both municipal and national government, with
85% of funding coming directly from the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the City
of London Corporation through donations, grants and legacies (MoL 2017–2020).
In the recent years, the museum closely engaged with smart city topics. For instance,
during the 2017–2018 season City Now City Future program, the MoL hosted 160,000 visi-
tors who attended a hundred of events, exhibitions, creative commissions, talks and
debates ‘to imagine how London will be from tomorrow to 2050’ (MoL 2017a). The
season included the major exhibition ‘The City Is Ours,’ featuring 15 displays and 87
events. This interactive exhibit directly involved its audiences to explore issues of ‘afford-
able housing, effective urban planning, transport, air quality, green spaces, surveillance,
smart city technology, diversity, activism and social cohesion’ (MoL 2017a).
Moreover, in 2017 the Mayor of London committed to build a new Museum of London
at West Smithfield Markets that is envisioned to be a truly smart museum that will exhibit
seven million objects available ‘to more people than ever before’ (MoL 2018, 16). Accord-
ing to the most recent Museum of London media release, ‘the City of London Corporation
has made an unprecedented investment into the project by putting forward £197 million’
10 N. GRINCHEVA
with a ‘substantial contribution of a capped £70 m has also been made by the Mayor of
London’ (MoL 2020).
Planning to open the doors in 2025 (Ament 2021), the new museum project aspires
‘to redefine what it means to be a twenty-first century museum for London’ by provid-
ing 24-hour access to city residents, visitors and dwellers ‘as a shared space for enjoy-
ment and contemporary discussion’ (MoL 2020). Conceptualized as a smart heritage
project, the new museum aims to offer ‘a democratic and inclusive arena for public
life, performance, installation and debate,’ capturing many voices of the smart city (Wil-
liams 2020). Smart heritage refers to an innovative heritage institution or site that ‘can
be enabled, accessed, experienced and shared by different technologies and commu-
nities of users both in person and remotely’ and diffused ‘outside the traditional
museum walls and spread around in the whole visitors’ experience of a territory’ (Erri-
chiello and Micera 2018, 7).
Indeed, with more than 2 million anticipated visitors, the new MoL envisions its role as
an active contributor to understanding the demographic profile of smart Londoners.
However, going beyond a mere demographic, the data projects, as anticipated by the
Director, will create a deeper understanding of London to solve big societal questions
and shape the urban futures (Ament 2021). For example, having a huge human remain
collections totaling around 20 thousands skeletons, the MoL collaborates with researchers
tracking the evidence of diseases of poverty which are currently re-emerging in London
(Ament 2021). This is one of the projects that Ament (2021) categorized as those impor-
tant data practices that aim to contribute to the smart city agenda on improving con-
ditions for health and well-being.
Aspiring to provide digital interactive tools and spaces ‘to participate as citizens in all
sorts of new ways’ (MoL 2020), the museum promises to open up digital heritage data to
the full agency of the smart city ecosystem. This type of data heritage practice refers to
eco-curation (see Table 2), or an ‘ecological curation,’ defined by Cameron (2021) as an
open and process-based curatorial activity that is attentive to environmental changes
and results in reconceptualization of digital cultural heritage as a dynamic ecological com-
position within a larger context (203). Within this system, different types of heritage and
urban data can not only be collected, shared, or circulated, but they can be made ‘active,’
remixed, reinterpreted and re-used in ‘a larger world’ to inform non-linear, iterative design
processes (Cameron 2021, 203).
The MoL Director, for instance, stressed that the new museum plans to host numerous
crowdsourcing activities for citizens, curate mass participation citizen science projects as
well as collect and preserve contemporary London digital cultures (Ament 2021). In this
way, the museum positions itself more than just space where urban data could be
accessed, shared or interpreted. It aspires to be a smart heritage site, closely integrated
with a smart city ecosystem of London with very lose and porous borders between a
museum space and a larger urban environment (Watson 2021). This new type of city
museum could produce new forms of data cognition and sensing, through which
urban data could be understood in terms of ‘radical interconnectedness in a wide
range of coordinates that are involved in eco-curating processes across human and
non-human agencies’ (Cameron 2021, 214). While still being in its infancy, the MoL
project promises to create a new smart heritage institution establishing a site for smart
city data eco-curating, enabling a dynamic hackable urban co-making.
A comparative analysis across cases demonstrated that three types of data practices
established by city museums through their programming (data storytelling, interpret-
ation and eco-curating) translated into different missions that museums have ident-
ified for themselves in their respected smart city ecosystems. Consequently, these
museums defined the roles of smart citizens within their data-intensive activities
through different approaches. These missions range from providing mere informa-
tional spaces to educate and nurture obedient smart citizens to attempting to
become partners to smart city governments contributing to policy development
through dedicated citizens engagement campaigns. The next section opens the dis-
cussion and analysis part, focusing first on the roles of city museums in larger smart
city contexts, ranging from a mere educational model to a democratic institution
(see Table 3).
The role of museums: from educational institutions to smart city

stakeholders
To identify and explain the roles that city museums chose to play in their smart city
environments, the analysis draws on the conceptual framework of museum civil engage-
ment models and functions (Black 2010). This framework allows to assess the capacities of
museums to actively support community empowerment and civil engagement on the
scale where on the one end we have a museum ‘being a ‘state space’, presenting a
single, ‘official’ account of the past,’ and on the opposite end a city museum understood
as ‘a shared space representing multiple perspectives’ (Black 2010, 129). Black (2010)
argued that the more a city museum is responsive to the needs of urban communities,
the more this museum can empower people to take an active role in the city decision-
making processes for the future.
Table 3 presents the scale with five role models that museums can adopt to facilitate
citizen engagements, ranging from mere memory institutions that only preserve and
present the historical and cultural heritage of the city for creating inclusive civil environ-
ments to truly responsive urban actors who collaborate with communities to meet the
needs of contemporary society by working directly with citizens’ input to facilitate
change (Black 2010). None of these far ends’ models, though, have been helpful to
describe three city museums’ activities and their perceived roles in their smart cities in
the analysis. Nevertheless, three role models in between two extremes perfectly illus-
trated how city museums in Singapore, New York and London identified their vision
and mission within their smart city environments, corresponding respectively to such
roles as a learning, social and democratic institution.
A museum as a learning institution prioritizes education of individuals and communities
to nurture responsible citizens who can contribute positively to urban development and
civic well-being (Falk 2009) (see Table 2). This could be done through interactive display
and enjoyable programming, engaging visitors’ minds as well as senses, stimuli and
responses to encourage learning by addressing audiences’ interests, needs and expec-
tations. The SCG offers a valuable example of this learning institution model, as it strongly
relies on its high-tech innovative exhibition design that encourages multisensory experi-
ences by facilitating interactive installations, participatory games and immersive tactile
encounters (URA 2021).
12
N. GRINCHEVA
Table 3. Singapore City Gallery, Museum of the City of New York, and Museum of London on the Museum Smart City Role Model, adopted from the museum civil
engagement framework (Black 2010).
City museum Museum role in
role Key functions Museum the Smart City Key functions Examples
Responsive Responding to citizens’ concerns to change their organization and culture to meet the needs of contemporary society.
institution
Democratic Facilitating civil dialogue and Museum of Smart City Engaging closely with ‘The City is Ours’ exhibition created a social forum
institution reflective participation in civil London stakeholder communities through data where representatives of different communities
society. practices to propose smart city discussed their neighborhoods’ challenges and
solutions and co-design policies offered innovative solutions by presenting their
current projects to larger urban communities to
debate the future of the city development.
Social Supporting and representing diversity Museum of the Facilitator of Providing access to data and The Future City Lab invited visitors to play with a
institution within the communities they serve City of civic activism improving citizens data literacy large volume of data to address urban challenges
in partnerships of equals. New York skills to empower a critical and reimagine the city by digitally redesigning
response and activism their neighborhoods and signaling critical
problems. It encouraged a diverse and inclusive
dialogue to contribute to urban narrative
construction.
Learning Educating and informing individuals Singapore City Educational Providing educational support ‘Smart Nation CityScape’ installation explained to
institution and communities who can Gallery institution through data-play to nurture citizens the smart city technological innovations
contribute positively to decision- smart citizens and policy to increase their data/digital literacy to
making about their future lives. effectively navigate the smart urban environment
and increase their security and well-being
Memory Collecting, conserving, documenting, and representing the cultures and life experiences of citizens to create inclusive society.
institution
According to Luke (2018), the primarily goal of the SGC is educating citizens about the
state’s aspired and asserted order of things so that citizens can learn in Geddes’ terms
(1915) to ‘see like the city.’ Indeed, as the Senior Manager explained, the SCG was devel-
oped as an interface for the public, to explain ‘the hard work behind the urban develop-
ment in the last 50 years,’ (SCG 2021). Addressing the lack of the ‘feeling of ownership,’ ,
the SCG serves ‘to explain the government’s balance choices and trade-offs in the careful
long-term planning and transformation of the city, so people can […] grow their appreci-
ation’ (SCG 2021).
For example, the ‘Smart Nation CityScape’ installation covers several key areas of how
the Smart Nation policies transform citizens life. In this respect, it features an installation
that captures and maps urban human flows in public spaces during COVID-19. It aims to
demonstrate the power of geospatial technology to address urban design challenges and
enhance public health and safety ‘rather than merely track the individual identifiable data
on citizens,’ as the government representative clarified (SMS 2021). While the exhibition
shares with the public a large volume of urban data, its primary objective is limited to
drive awareness and promote Smart Nation agenda among wider communities (SNS
2021). Terry Lim, Senior Assistant Director of the Adoption and Engaging Directorate at
Smart Nation stressed, ‘We hope that when visitors come here, they will walk away think-
ing about what Smart Nation means to them and hopefully they will realize that everyone
has a part to play in building our smart nation’ (SNS 2021).
Glass (2018) pointed out that the Gallery is ‘performative and is a reaction to shifts in
state–society relations’ (Glass 2018, 252). SCG installations intend to excite visitors by
encouraging ‘to put their eyeballs to the street, their fingers on the screens, and to
appreciate why the government has made specific choices over time’ (Glass 2018, 252).
As a highly ‘performative’ space (Glass 2018), where the ‘information is pushed out to citi-
zens,’ the SCG serves to ‘produce particular regulatory outcomes that actively shape
behavior’ of people (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018, 6). Contributing to the smart city move-
ment as a promotional campaign on behalf of the Smart Nation government, the
gallery offers a space for social learning. Accepting its role as an educational institution
in the smart city ecosystem (see Table 3), the SCG offers excellent learning environments
for citizens to ‘infuse digital literacy’ into their minds, or to ‘enculturate the ideas and
ideals of using digital technologies to manage cities and solve urban issues’ (Kitchin et
al. 2017a, 15).
Progressing to one level up on the scale of citizen engagement model, the MCNY is
an interesting illustration of a social institution that builds its programming to invite,
support and represent the many voices of diverse urban communities in partnerships
of equals (Black 2010) (see Table 3). Creating a friendly and welcoming environment,
such a museum primarily aims to actively encourage visitors’ own contributions to
museum exhibitions and content seeking to represent multiple perspectives (Falk
2009). Rather than representing an ‘official’ version of the urban narrative and image,
the social institution celebrates pluralism by ensuring a diverse and inclusive content
coming from multiple sources. Such a museum prioritizes a user-generated content
through community participation and creative output facilitated through dialogical
interactive installations. It opens beyond its physical walls to share debates and discus-
sions with communities through social media networks to circulate stories about the life
in the locality now (Black 2010).
14 N. GRINCHEVA
For example, in the context of the MCNY, the Future City Lab provided visitors with a
large volume of data on urban challenges and offered an opportunity to reimagine the
city through at least two activities (Henry 2018). First, What If? Table facilitated unmoder-
ated exchanges of visitors’ views of New York under ‘what if’ conditions. The conversa-
tions continued online via Twitter and were shared publicly on the MCNY’s website
(Henry 2018). Second, the design games Challenge Tables on the Living with Nature,
Housing a Growing Population, and Getting Around invited visitors to redesign their
own city boroughs to address key challenges in the local contexts. The interactive
Tables supplied visitors with various data sets and metrics, including sustainability and
cost of decisions, to inform meaningful urban planning (Henry 2018). Participants’
design outcomes were displayed on the gallery walls as well as shared through social
media to move the conversations beyond the museum space.
Reflecting on the place of the Lab in New York, its Director stressed that it was directly
motivated by the discussions of the smart city development, but in two contradictory
ways (Ackerman 2021). On one hand, the Lab aspired not only to provide urban data
access to offer ‘information just for the sake of information.’ It intended to educate citi-
zens to intelligently use, analyses and interpret data to interrogate the politics of data
access, inclusion, provenance and hidden biases. On the other hand, the Lab ‘was a reac-
tion against some smart city assumptions and ideas.’ It expressed the citizens scepticism
about the smart city aspirations of the Open Data as a panacea to social ills and ques-
tioned their actual applicability to address concerns of local neighborhoods and commu-
nities. ‘One of the things that we really challenged ourselves to do,’ the Lab Director
pointed out, ‘is not to create flashy data visualizations […] that exhibit a technocratic
approach to city management’ (Ackerman 2021).
The museum encourages visitors ‘to think of themselves as agents of urban change,
much as the historical figures elsewhere in the exhibition were for the city’s past,’ the
Museum Director shared (Henry 2018, 64). While adhering to smart city transparency
and accountability, the Future City Lab and its data-intensive exhibitions also served as
educational spaces. But, by contrast to the SCG, this education did not merely justify
municipal government decisions. Instead, the MCNY aspired to be a public space
where these decisions could be challenged and contested, where people could learn
how to translate data into stories about their communities to actively shape the city nar-
ratives and discourses. In this way, the MCNY perceived its role in the smart city as an
active facilitator of civic activism that tasks itself not only to provide an access to urban
data but mainly to offer tools for their interpretation to empower a critical response
and activism (see Table 3).
Finally, the MoL offers a valuable example of a museum that in the smart city ecosys-
tem works to adopt the role of a democratic institution (see Table 3). According to Black
(2010), such a democratic institution aims to support civil dialogue and to motivate an
active and reflective participation in civil society by accepting a great flexibility in its
program design. This type of institution seeks to nurture democratic citizens who can
act responsibly, taking due account of the impact of their actions and choices on their
communities (Goodin 2003). This could be done by expanding the museum exhibitory
spaces and transforming them into open forums of civil engagement. These forums are
built on carefully planned and designed programming platforms that feature voices of
individuals who have first-hand knowledge, represent their neighborhoods and
communities and can facilitate a productive dialogue among all involved participants and
stakeholders (McRainey 2008, 40).
For instance, the MoL’s City Now City Future program aspired to provide a space to
nurture, support and empower change-makers among citizens. However, in comparison
to MCNY, the museum aimed to go beyond the gamification design opportunities to
facilitate urban transformations. The program clearly stressed ‘We didn’t just want to
talk about making the city better: we wanted to actually do it, to help Londoners be
agents of positive change in their city’ (MoL 2017a). ‘The City is Ours’ exhibition directly
partnered with 25 local projects across London ‘working to make the city a better place,’
by redistributing food waste, installing solar panels, helping deaf Londoners navigate the
city or building sustainable housing (MoL 2017b). These local projects ranged from Open
Data Camden that shared 300 government data sets with the local communities to You-
Choose App, an online budget simulator that engaged citizens with decision-making
about government budgets (MoL 2017b).
In this way, the museum provided a space for focused discussions on the community
problems with public organizations and groups who have already been working on smart
city issues in the field. The exhibition curator clarified that during the program duration,
these projects were presented at the museum and discussed through dedicated commu-
nity talks. ‘We did not curate anything they said,’ she stressed, ‘It was important for us to
give these community organizations a space to share their aspirations and accomplish-
ments’ (Sussums 2021). The curator further identified the role of the museum in
running these community engagement activities as a ‘convener,’ a dedicated platform
that gave citizens a space for deliberation to engage closer with various issues of
urban challenges and futures (Sussums 2021).
Specifically, Sussums (2021) acknowledged that the selection process of the participat-
ing projects was driven by the London Smart City Strategy on data sharing, prioritizing
those projects that represented London Open Data initiatives and their implications for
the local communities. Bringing them in the centre for public debates, the museum
offered a space to nurture smart citizenship through establishing opportunities for city-
wide collaborations ‘to design and share what works for citizens across public and com-
munity services’ (GLA 2019, 14). Furthermore, the MoL Director stressed that it was one of
the museum’s missions to explore meaningful ways how community engagements activi-
ties could further contribute to the development of the smart city (Ament 2021).
This vision of being an important factor in the smart city co-making amplified even
further in the agenda of the new MoL, currently being built ‘at the heart of one of the capi-
tal’s most historic and creative quarters, Smithfield’ (MoL 2020). Aiming to be ‘an active
contributor to the smart city policy rather than just a recipient’ (Ament 2021), the MoL
positions itself as an important Smart city stakeholder that can engage closely with com-
munities to propose smart city solutions and co-design policies (see Table 3). It sees its
role as an ‘intermediary’ between citizens and the municipal government. The Director
explained, ‘I would like every future Mayor of London to think about the museum as a
place where they can connect to its citizens’ (Ament 2021). According to de Waal et al.
(2020a) such a professional involvement of an ‘intermediary’ offers a sustainable model
for developing meaningful government-citizens partnerships in a smart city. Bottom-up
self-organizing civic initiatives are quite seldom and could achieve a greater impact
only with a help of ‘community orchestrators’ (Balestrini et al. 2017) or ‘urban curators’
16 N. GRINCHEVA
(Beer et al. 2015). As a ‘centre of expertise,’ the museum could be an ‘initiator of collabora-
tive city-making projects’ by capturing or operationalising the knowledge produced by
‘more volatile, informal, interdisciplinary network-shaped field of collectives’ (Foth 2017).
On the Black’s (2010) scale of museum role models, the MoL’s aspirations and program-
ming to participate in the smart city life of London place it on the higher level of the
democratic institution that moves a step forward from a social role, adopted by the
MCNY, and goes far beyond a mere educational mission, taken by the SCG (see Table
3). However, even though understanding and capturing citizens’ concerns, visions and
ideas is important, only translating them ‘into policies and the execution of policy frame-
works’ can, in fact, facilitate a real change (de Waal et al. 2020a). In order for a city to
become an urban ‘living lab [or] a playground of innovation and transformation’ smart
citizens should acquire and be able to strategically use their power to co-design a city
on several role levels ‘from a mere informant to tester as well as contributor and co-
creator in the development processes’ (Veeckman and Graaf 2014).
While, as the section demonstrated, these perceived roles of the museums in their
respective smart city ecosystems translate into specific institutional policies and program-
ming, it is important to understand to what extent they empower citizens to act as con-
tributors to the smart city co-making. The next section addresses this question and
focuses on a critical analysis of the place and role assigned by museums to their visitors
in data-intensive exhibitions and installations.
The role of citizens: from smart city recipients to proposers

To analyses to what extent citizens are transformed from mere smart city users to active
decision-makers through data practices offered by the city museums, the article employs
the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation developed by Cardullo and Kitchin (2018) (see
Table 4). Depending on the amount of power that citizens acquire in different smart city
activities, they identified several levels of smart citizens participation. It starts with the
lowest level of Non-participation, on which citizens are understood as passive ‘data sub-
jects’ who are nudged towards specific sets of behaviors and practices. The Scaffold
reaches the highest point at the level of Citizen Power, where citizens are granted the
dominant decision-making authority and acquire control rights within a co-shared initiat-
ive (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018) (see Table 4).
However, none of the analysed museums could be associated with these upper top or
lower bottom levels. Instead, all three museums’ examples sit perfectly in between these
opposite extremes on the level of Tokenism. It concerns various degrees of citizen engage-
ment with a lower form, where citizens can only access and repurpose open data. Higher
forms of Tokenism are based on collecting citizens feedback on certain government pol-
icies or programs through public crowdsourcing tools from social media to hackathons
(Cardullo and Kitchin 2018). Data-intensive installations of the SCG, MCNY and MoL
that shaped museum goers’ specific behavior, outputs and attitudes offered valuable
examples, placing three museums respectively on the levels of Information, where citizens
take a role of recipients of smart city policies and programs, Consultation, where museum
goers are understood as participants or testers of the smart city solutions, and, finally, Pla-
cation, the level on which museum visitors act as proposers of the smart city future devel-
opments (see Table 4).
Table 4. Visitors of the Singapore City Gallery, Museum of the City of New York and Museum of
London on the Museum Smart Citizen Engagement model, adopted from the Scaffold of Smart
Citizen Participation (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018).
Level of Role of
Form of civic citizens’ citizens’ Museum Examples of citizens role in
engagement participation involvement Characteristics example data-intensive installations
Citizen Power Citizen control Leader Co-owner who can
generate ideas,
share vision and
design policies.
Delegated Decision- Partner involved in
power maker co-creation of
smart city
solutions and
policies.
Partnership Co-creator Actor involved in co-
production of the
smart city agenda
through
negotiations.
Tokenism Placation Proposer Critical reviewer Museum of ‘The City is Ours’ engaged
who can suggest London local communities and
improvements. stakeholders in London
to feature their projects
and discuss future urban
development.
Consultation Participant- Active user who can Museum of The Future City Lab invited
tester share feedback. the City of participants to
New York reinterpret Open Data to
signal challenges and
explore opportunities in
their neighborhoods.
Information Recipient Person acting upon Singapore Smart Nation CityScape’
instructions and City educated digitally
regulations. Gallery literate citizens to
appreciate the
Singapore Smart Nation
Plan agenda and
policies.
Non- Therapy Patient-user Subject who is being
Participation steered and
nudged toward a
preferred
behavior.
Manipulation Data-point Subject fully
controlled by the
smart city
government.
On the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation the SCG facilitates data practices which
place citizens involvement on the lower level of Information, on which they are mainly
provided access to urban administrative and operational data, including, real-time data-
sets related to transport and environment. For example, ‘Smart Nation CityScape’ offers
interactive displays that feature accurate open data representing the planning of towns
and amenities and informing the development of smart urban infrastructure (SNS
2021). Sharing the data with citizens is, indeed, important to create transparency and
accountability with regards to the actions and decisions of smart city authority.
However, a mere act of citizens’ informing ‘is often unidirectional, with limited or no
18 N. GRINCHEVA
channel for feedback’ and ‘is often provided after key planning and decision-making pro-
cesses have occurred, leaving little or no room for change’ (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018, 8).
For instance, while the exhibition ‘Smart Nation CityScape’ was an important attempt
of the smart city government to communicate to a broader public the Smart Nation
national agenda, these efforts were not intended to generate outputs to inform the
policy development. The Smart Nation spokesperson explained that museums are not
necessarily seen by the government as meaningful sites where smart city policies could
be co-designed with citizens. The SCG Senior Manager also revealed that apart from
sharing the data with the public, the gallery hasn’t developed mechanisms to collect or
analyze public contributions to inform urban policy development. Due to a high
volume of visitors, including school tours, educational groups and VIP guests who
come for an expert advice, as explained by managers, the gallery’s expectations on the
quality of the audience input are very low (SCG 2021).
The SCG is designed to facilitate social interactions and enable group conversations in
the exhibition space, but there are no tools to record the visitors’ feedback, nor there was
an interest on the gallery side to engage closer with visitors’ data practices and their
outputs. Challenged by a direct question if the exhibition could be considered as a
civic site of data practice, the Smart Nation Spokesperson shared the limitations of CityS-
cape as a site to ‘facilitate participatory planning’ where data collected from citizens could
‘inform the policy-making’ (SMS 2021). The government sees museums as spaces where
people could be exposed to important ideas and discourses. However, the museum might
not necessarily be a conducive space where audiences ‘have the mindset of giving proper
constructive feedback […] Not enough to the extent that [they] can take it seriously as
sufficient information to work upon’ (SMS 2021).
According to the Smart Nation Spokesperson the participatory citizen engagement can
happen beyond the museum spaces: ‘if we want to build something constructive, we
bring people into a room where they can focus on the discussion’ (SMS 2021). Apparently,
the SCG cannot offer such a dialogical space, where visitors could ‘focus’ on city problems
and share meaningful feedback on urban development tasks. Understood as subjects of
the smart nation educational agenda, visitors to ‘Smart Nation Cityscape’ are rather
‘gently persuaded of how to conduct a way of life contained within optimal or ideal
targets around environmentally friendly use of resources or care of own body’ (Cardullo
and Kitchin 2018, 6). In this way, the SCG shares urban data with citizens, but with little
access to or even no political capital to act upon them. Within this framework, citizens
could only be understood as mere recipients of smart city policies (see Table 4), co-
opted in neoliberal discourses of efficiency and environmental sustainability (Cardullo
and Kitchin 2018).
Going one level up on the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation the MCNY exemplifies
smart citizen engagement understood in terms of Consultation (see Table 4). On this level
citizens are invited to provide their critical feedback on the smart city developments and
agenda through various forms of social media and online tools (de Waal et al. 2020b). This
user-testing feedback can be quite productive to ‘keep civic paternalism in check’ by con-
testing decisions and assertions taken by smart city authorities (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018,
8). For example, aiming to engage citizens to critically reflect on the urban data, the
Future City Lab, offered a meaningful design hub were interested citizens could play
with the Open Data to reimagine their neighborhoods and communities. Indeed, the
Lab’s creative interactives offered an interface for developing human-centered smart city
dashboards that can ‘draw in large volumes of participants with higher potential for con-
tribution and activity than traditional style community engagement forums such as town-
hall events’ (Lock et al. 2020, 5). Within the smart city participatory agenda, these forms of
citizen engagement could be understood as meaningful data practices. Such practices
empower the ‘citizen voice’ through more open and transparent data sharing and repur-
posing to produce interactive maps, graphs and applications (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018).
A focused policy analysis of the Smart City of New York, though, was not productive to
identify the government’s intentions, strategies or incentives to engage with museums as
citizens hubs to collect the public feedback. In this regard, the Future City Lab’s objectives
to involve people ‘not only in the discussions, but in the decision-making processes to
ensure future change’ (Ackerman 2021), were merely aspirational. While the MCNY
employed gallery’s screens and social media to feature visitors’ ideas and outputs in rede-
signing city neighborhoods which could contribute to larger urban narratives and dis-
courses, it is questionable if these data practices were potent to shape decision-making
in the smart city of NYC. Furthermore, the MCNY, the same way as the SCG, did not
develop specific reliable mechanisms to collect citizen feedback to inform the urban
policy development. While Ackerman (2021) emphasized, ‘It’s not only politicians and
experts and economists who are in cast of making decisions,’ he also expressed doubts
that visitors’ designs of their boroughs created at the data Lab were useful for a demo-
cratic process of city co-making.
Similarly to his colleagues at the SCG, he indicated that apart from being hard to
dynamically collect and store data generated by visitors, the real value of audience feed-
back for urban policy-making was unclear. However, a reason he indicated for that,
places the MCNY in direct opposition to CSG, where visitors are simply not trusted to
provide quality feedback. Instead, the Lab Director referred to a certain ‘bias toward
the views of well-educated, technologically-literate participants in the digital public
sphere’ (Crutcher and Zook 2009). Specifically, he stressed that a very selective
sample of the museum’s visitors who actively participated in interactive design at
their Lab might have produced data that would not be representative of what really
was going on the ground in different city neighborhoods (Ackerman 2021). He ques-
tioned if these interactive design exercises performed at the museum’s premises
could be valid, reliable and trustworthy without the input gathered from actual commu-
nities (Dodge and Kitchin 2013).
The Lab Director admitted that they never achieved a degree of community work that
would be required to co-develop solutions for urban problems, useful for city planners.
‘One of my dreams,’ Ackerman (2021) shared, ‘was to work directly with community
groups on the ground to run design shreds at the museum’ to engage participants in a
very focused way and brainstorm working ideas. However, with the hit of the Covid-19
pandemic crisis and the closure of the Lab in 2020 these ambitions did not progress
beyond a mere vision. While the MCNY activities were not potent to feed the government
policymaking with direct citizen input, they still nurtured more engaged and responsible
smart citizens who were invited to share their concerns and use the museum as an open
advocacy space. In comparison to the Singapore case, where the SCG is co-opted by the
government to serve as its mouthpiece, independently curated MCNY engaged its visitors
20 N. GRINCHEVA
as active participants in the development of the smart city narratives and discourses who
could voice their opinions (see Table 4).
Moving one step up on the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation the MoL’s program-
ming and activities could offer an example of Placation (see Table 3). On that level, citi-
zens are expected to exercise their rights to contribute to a set of urban design
initiatives with their own proposals and solutions. However, on that level smart city
initiatives can allow only a partial rearrangement of ‘the deckchairs on a ship’s deck’
that does not ‘determine how the ship is run or its general course’ (Cardullo and
Kitchin 2018, 8). For instance, understood as proposers of new smart city developments
based on their professional expertise and first-hand experiences in local community
projects, participants of the City Now City Future program in the MoL, indeed, were
directly involved in their neighborhoods’ future planning. However, the questions
remain who actually exercised the real decision-making power and if/how proposed
changes were implemented.
In fact, London was the only city among selected for this research where the municipal
government clearly identified museums as important actors in the smart city develop-
ment. The Smarter London Together Strategic Framework has a dedicated section on
the role of cultural institutions in the smart city (GLA 2019). This document stresses
one of its strategic priorities to explore ‘how cultural institutions, including the new
Museum of London being built at Smithfield Market, can promote greater understanding
of Londoners about the smart technologies and data shaping their lives’ (GLA 2019, 38).
Referring to the 2017–2018 City Now City Future, the strategic framework illustrates the
role of city museums as important playgrounds that facilitate public discussions and
increase citizen participation (GLA 2019, 38). Julia Thompson (2021), Smart City Policy
Lead confirmed that among five missions of the Smarter London Together Road Map,
‘there is a specific task around connecting to cultural institutions.’
Apart from running their own dedicated platforms for direct two-way communication
with the public, the London government stresses the role of city museums in facilitating
this dialogue with citizens. ‘Cultural institutions and particularly museums, in fact, are a
great way for people to have a bit more tangible relationship with the city and share
their feedback,’ Smart City Policy Lead stressed (Thompson 2021). Indeed, the MoL’s
urban data practices can establish a meaningful space for active engagement with
London researchers, citizens groups, activists and communities working on the ground.
Offering some examples, the MoL Director mentioned the new project of addressing
the downturns of contemporary citizen’s loneliness in the smart city. Stressing the
museum’s role as a crucial meeting point and a place for civic socialization, she empha-
sized that especially the new MoL could become a dedicated space where citizens can
engage with data, learn about themselves, and reshape the social composition of the
smart city (Ament 2021).
This, however, could be established only when all parties, governments, museums and
communities, are on equal footing, but the potentials for smart city co-making on the pre-
mises of the MoL remain questionable. For instance, the Smart City Policy Lead (2021)
confirmed that the government’s goals to establish closer collaborations with museums
as sites of smart citizens engagements remain unaccomplished. The MoL Director also
admitted that in the past several years it was difficult to continue these conversations
with the government in the framework of the City Cooperation of London agenda. The
2021 London Mayoral election and the Covid-19 pandemic situation drastically shifted the
focus of the government attention (Ament 2021).
Though the museum does see its communities and stakeholders as active proposers of
smart city solutions (see Table 4), at the moment, no direct mechanisms or schemes have
been developed between the government and the museum to feed the smart city gov-
ernance decision-making processes through participatory citizen engagement in the
museum. While both parties explicitly commit working toward this direction, without pur-
posefully designed citizen-centred policy-making mechanisms in place, these participa-
tory activities could be mere ‘performative acts’ which only claim to involve citizens in
planning and decision-making (Cardullo and Kithcin 2020). In this way, citizenship
could ‘operate largely as an empty signifier […] with the underlying neoliberal ethos
and mode of governmentality remained unchanged’ (Cardullo 2021, 7), because there
is ‘no follow through, no muscle, hence no assurance of changing the status quo’ (Arn-
stein 1969, 217).
As this section demonstrated, none of the museums enabled their visitor to exercise
the Citizen Power (see Table 4), the most rewarding form of civic participation in which
people reach ‘increasing degrees of decision-making clout’ (Arnstein 1969, 217).
However, even though a citizen power could be an appealing and desirable goal for
museums, ‘in practice such bottom-up, inclusive, and empowering citizen involvement
in key decision-making about cities is difficult to achieve’ (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018,
9). The MoL’s case clearly demonstrates that the museum’s ambitions to directly contrib-
ute to the smart city policy development through devoted community engagement
activities as well as the rhetoric of the London authorities stressing the important role
of museums in the process of smart city co-making do not easily translate into robust
mechanisms which can transform mere aspirations into meaningful actions.
Nevertheless, these examples have important practical implications for museum
management, especially in terms of nurturing new type of engaged and responsible citi-
zens who must acquire new skills and competences not only to successfully navigate
but more importantly to co-own smart cities. ‘Promoting or inhibiting active citizenship
and so tackling or reinforcing the experience of social exclusion’ has long been an
important task on city museums agenda (Newman et al. 2009, 42). The challenge for
museums however remained on the institutional transformation side to firmly establish
such a culture so it champions civil engagement at an appropriate level (Black 2010).
Most recently, the processes of increasing digitalization and datafication called for
more transparency, accountability, social inclusion and equity, amplifying the urgency
and importance of these tasks. As Errichiello and Micera (2018) argued, in the age of
smart cities, museums are expected to exercise their civic role by offering dedicated
spaces, where people can access ‘reliable data to actively participate in the city life,
also contributing to increase the transparency of public administrations and create a
dialogue’ (11). The process of nurturing this digital citizenship in museums can result
in a greater breadth of civic participation and richer opportunities for smart citizenry
(Borda and Bowen 2021), that according to Angelidou (2015) can contribute to the
growth of intangible capital to promote the ‘smartness’ of cities.
However, it is important to stress that state-of-the-art technologies alone cannot
necessarily guarantee a ‘museum for everyone’ to foster citizen-driven innovations in
smart cities (Errichiello and Micera 2018, 14). This article offers three examples of
22 N. GRINCHEVA
dedicated data practices established by museums in Singapore, New York, and London
that convincingly demonstrate that a potential for community engagement depends
on multiple factors, including the museums’ missions and visions, their perceived roles
in smart city ecosystems as well as the level of smart city policy development that
could either recognize or neglect city museums as important venues for practicing
citizen activism. Educating smart citizens as recipients, collaborating with smart city
users or testers and inviting proposers to co-create smart cities offer working models
that exemplify progressing levels of smart citizens engagement. Challenged by civic
mission to nurture smart citizenship that goes beyond a mere data access and digital lit-
eracy development among wider populations, museums can employ the framework to
assess their community work while offering different sites of data practices from data
storytelling to eco-curation.
Conclusions
The article documented connections and synergies between city museums’ visions and
programming as well as emerging smart city issues and dilemmas in a fast-paced
urban environment, marked with the processes of increasing digitalization and datafica-
tion. The SCG, CMTY and MoL actively build their programming and design data-driven
installations to reflect urban challenges emerging in the smart city, ranging from environ-
mental concerns to safe communities. A comparative analysis across cases illustrated,
though, that different political and economic contexts within selected smart cities differ-
ently shape how museums understand their roles as sites of urban data practices as well
as what power they ascribe to citizens in a smart city co-making. The article is evidence
that city museums can either empower their visitors to consider their roles as active
city co-makers or see them as passive recipients of the smart city transformations.
The case of the SCG, for instance, illustrated how the authoritarian regime of Singapore
shapes a development of a dedicated city museum that only reinforces civic paternalism,
where smart citizens participation is framed in a very narrow instrumental way. Taking an
educational role, the gallery serves the smart governments as a ‘performative’ space to
nurture smart citizenry as obedient recipients and deliver its vision of the smart future
development. Offering a dedicated data storytelling site, the SCG represents Singapore
as a culmination of ‘bureaucratic decision-making that is data-based and focused on con-
structing a better, globally connected city’ (Shatkin 2014). It is designed to convince citi-
zens in governments’ decisions to shape the city’s future and functions to reassert the
value of the Smart Nation vision for Singapore
The MCNY, in a more open democratic environment where the city museum retains its
curatorial independence, has developed a different stance as a social intuition or a space
of civic activism. As the Director of the museum explains: ‘MCNY is located in and tells the
story of a city that is overwhelmingly liberal, both politically and culturally. In many ways,
American urban liberalism was born in New York, and its legacy is still very much alive’
(Henry 2018, 65). Offering a site of data interpretation, the museum aims to empower
responsible smart citizens who can question the government decision and learn to use
the Open Data in a more critical way to tell their own community stories. In light of
absent municipal government’s commitments to engage with local museums as delibera-
tive sites of smart city participatory design, the MCNY sees its institutional mission as an
urban data interpreter. It positions itself as site of data practice, where smart city partici-
pants or testers can voice their concerns and share their visions of the city future in a
wider public space.
However, such a site lacks a political participation platform or a mechanism that would
bring all these public contributions to the attention of the government. This is also the
case in London, despite the MoL’s strong ambitions to make significant contributions
to the smart city policy development. With a long tradition of public support of cultural
institutions, London municipal government commits to nurture deeper connections with
the cultural sector, especially with city museums which are understood as important sites
of engaging with smart citizens. The Mayor of London invested considerable resources in
the development of the new MoL as a smart heritage project that aims to inspire further
innovative transformation of the city. Directly funded by the government, the new
museum intends to assert its place in a smart city ecosystem as a democratic institution
by offering a dedicated space for smart citizens to engage closer with major urban chal-
lenges and societal problems.
Nevertheless, as evidenced through conversations with both the Smart City Policy
representative and the MoL Director, these official commitments on both sides
remain more aspirational rather than realistic. Offering opportunities for data eco-
curation, the MoL could serve as an important ‘intermediary’ between smart city pro-
posers and the municipal government in participatory smart city design and manage-
ment. However, currently, there is no mechanisms, tools or specific programs in place
to ensure such a democratic city co-making. It would be fascinating to further explore
if/how these aspirations would translate in the future into the new MoL’s program-
ming as a smart heritage site as well as into the specific political mechanisms on the
government side to facilitate a productive two-way communication with smart
citizens.
The future research should also expand the geography of the empirical framework and
add case studies across smart cities and different parts of the world, where city museums
might have developed explicit or implicit links and connections to smart city visions, nar-
ratives, and agenda. Worth mentioning, for instance, that many urban planning galleries,
administered by state agencies, similar to the SCG, are currently mushrooming in Asia.
‘China has eleven city galleries, Hong Kong, Seoul and Jakarta have one, Qatar is going
to have one soon, quite a few will be open soon in the Middle East’ (SCG 2021). In the
context of increasing urban datafication and smart city developments these newly emer-
ging museums offer educational sites of data practice where they mostly serve as
‘material imprints of urban political goals’ (Glass 2018).
A different trend, however, might be emerging in Western, more liberal political con-
texts, similar to where the MCNY identified its place in opposition to the smart city gov-
ernance, offering a site for contestation, debate and civic activism. However, as
Zandbergen and Uitermark (2020) indicate, a manifestation of ‘smart citizenship’
depends on many factors, including social, economic and political traditions which
shape local relationships among governments and city residents. The case of the MoL
and its close connection to the municipal government, in comparison to the MCNY,
demonstrates that within more democratic societies there could be a wide range of
relationships established among urban stakeholders ‘to develop new governance infra-
structures and practices for civic engagement’ (Foth and Brynskov 2016).
24 N. GRINCHEVA
This article started an important conversation about the role of city museums in devel-
oping these ‘governance infrastructures’ by exploring museums as participatory sites of
interactive data practices. As Giannini and Bowen (2019) point out, ‘the future for cultural
heritage and the GLAM sector in the smart city agenda is evolving at a fast pace […] and it
will most likely continue to be dynamically shaped’ by museums who encourage and
support innovation and social engagements in the urban context (545). With more
smart city governments prioritizing culture as a pillar in the sustainable urban develop-
ment (Angelidou and Stylianidis 2020), this research requires further academic attention,
especially in relation to evolving city museums’ social roles in changing smart city con-
texts and their implications for citizens.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Dr Natalia Grincheva is an internationally recognized expert in innovative forms and global trends
in contemporary museology, digital diplomacy, and international cultural relations. She received
many prestigious international academic awards, including Fulbright (2007–2009), Quebec Fund
(2011–2013), Australian Endeavour (2012–2013), SOROS research grant (2013–2014) and visiting
research Fellowship (2020) at the University of Oxford. Most recently she accepted a position of a
Program Leader in Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Her major pub-
lications include two monographs: Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age (Routledge: 2020) and
Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy (Routledge: 2019). Currently she is working on a new co-
authored monograph, Geopolitics of Digital Heritage (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming
2023).
ORCID
Natalia Grincheva http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3955-6351
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City museums in the age of dataﬁcation: could museums be

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The interdisciplinary academic scholarship across museology and urban studies

Research questions and methodology

Case studies: museums as cites of data practices

Museum of London: eco-curating smart city data

The role of museums: from educational institutions to smart city

The role of citizens: from smart city recipients to proposers

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