The Annual Conference of the International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities (CAMOC) will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden between 6 to 9 of August 2014. The programme is filled with interesting presentations, workshops and study visits.
Even as its on-going presence declines in the developed world, industry continues to dominate many cities by the lasting mark that it has left on both their landscape and their social infrastructure.
While all industrial cities, by their nature, share certain characteristics (including, among their many other features, urban crowding, suburban expansion, transportation extension, and social migration) their structure and progress nonetheless depend to a large extent on local specifics – physical, social, and cultural; historical and contemporary.
Manchester is an industrial city, to be sure—but so too are Los Angeles and Nagoya. Today, as such diverse urban-industrial landscapes adjust to the demands of an expanding information- and service-based economy, our attitude toward the places and social infrastructure left over from the manufacturing era is likewise changing.
Contemporary metropolitan residents must come to understand the city’s industrial heritage neither as an eternal law of nature nor as an artefact of a distant past. It represents, instead, one stage of a constant process of urban change, conditioning our choices for the future as it shapes our memory of the past.
The conference focuses on the following question: What role can City Museums play in helping people to understand, explain, and make use of the transformation of urban society from its industrial base to a future marked by limited resources and expanding technological capabilities?
Themes
-The role of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in urban development
-City “museums” around the city: museum experiences within and beyond the museum walls
-Use of new technologies to document and present urban heritage
-The role of migration in industrial and post-industrial society
Programme / Registration
In the conference’s website, the entire conference booklet, with the programme and the abstracts can be downloaded, accessible at: http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/camoc/PDF/CAMOC_Goteborg_programme__booklet_1.pdf
For those who would like to attend, there is still time to register online at: https://www.viaregi.com/registration/deltagerweb.aspx?kid=2542&pid=53069
CAMOCnews
Also the summer issue of CAMOCnews (3/2014) has just come out it is and equally rich in material.
The issue is accessible through the following link: http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/camoc/PDF/CAMOC_Newsletter_2014_03.pdf
