About the network

How can we study the public and everyday reception and reconfiguration of monuments and the spaces they occupy? How can museums and other heritage institutions play a role in engaging the public in the preservation and care of public monuments? What is it that ignites or turns on urban monument and momentarily or more permanently? And how can museums and scholars engage their users, students and other citizen groups when working with the monumental heritage of cities? 

The explorations will be organized within three major themes: 

1) Mapping Monuments: Typologies and biographies of urban monuments,

2) Ignition and care: Monuments in jeopardy 

3) Commemoration and Citizenship: Outreach and Participation. 

Each workshop will explore aspects of monument-citizen interaction and their continuous production and reconfiguration in selected cities drawing on museum collections, paintings, artefacts, written sources, interviews and ethnographic observations. To support cross-fertilization in critical thinking, the exploration of each subtheme will be organized around an interdisciplinary set-up in seminars, exploratory workshops and conferences. The network seeks to enhance the research field and set the ground for future research projects within the study of urban monuments. With the specific focus on the everyday uses and reconfigurations of monuments the research network aims at securing a platform for the development of new agendas and methodologies within the field of monument, memory and urban heritage studies.