Civic engagement as a new role for a Museum Exhibition
This Month, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) comes with an exhibition called New York at its Core, exposing objects that remember all important ages of the city. Objects like a baseball signed by the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, commissioner’s badges, among others.
But the new and impressive part comes at the end of the exibition in a room called Future City Lab, where data manipulations and interactives challenge the public to think critically. Those interactive panels invite the New Yorkers to explore five central challenges and opportunities that New York will face in coming generations, according to the MCNY website. On its website MCNY also challenge the public exposing five challenges topics that comes as open-ended questions such as:
- Making a Living: What can we do to provide economic opportunities for the next generation?
- Living Together: How can we foster a more inclusive city?
- Housing a Growing Population: How can we meet the housing needs of New Yorkers?
- Living with Nature: How can New York City enhance its natural environment and cope with climate change?
- Getting Around: How can we make it easier for people to get into and around the city?
Also according to the MCNY, “The Future City Lab gives you the opportunity to interact with these issues, to imagine the city’s future by designing a street, a building, and a park, and to discover ways of addressing the challenges, drawing ideas from cities around the world”.
Those kind of interactions, challenges and incentive to critical thinking is the key to a better society and Urban Planning scenario, where population are aware of the difficulties of planners and also can help on what is in it’s range.
This is an interesting and entertaining way to bring civic engagement to a city, and innovation events like comes to change and challenge the mindset we are now used to. And this is clear by the words of Sarah Henry, MCNY deputy director and chief curator, “We see ourselves as a civic organization — a place that promotes citizenship and engagement in the life of the city”.
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