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ABSTRACT
In this article we analyse the Van Eesteren Museum as a technique of local governmentality. This small but growing institution aims to preserve and showcase the modernist urban planning and architecture of the disadvantaged Amsterdam neighbourhood of Slotermeer. Built on volunteers, residents’ participation played a crucial role in its creation and still does in its day-to-day operation. While many see the museum as a bottom-up project, upon closer inspection, this participatory heritage project appears more ambivalent, effectively functioning as a platform for mediating conflicting interests and agendas in an urban context that is heavily shaped by local and national policies of urban renewal. This neighbourhood museum responds to a specific Dutch policy of state-led gentrification aimed at promoting social control while actually (unintentionally) producing social cleavages. Only a very specific and rather homogenous group of residents volunteer for the museum, other residents with more diverse backgrounds do not really participate. While the Van Eesteren Museum is rooted in this specific Dutch context, we argue that it points to the relevance of heritage to a new rationality of decentralised local governance based on producing ‘caring’ and ‘feeling’ citizens.
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge help from Anouk de Wit in making sure we did not overlook important facts regarding the Van Eesteren Museum and Linda van de Kamp for her helpful comments after reading our draft. Our gratitude goes out to the many volunteers of the museum that participated in our fieldwork. Without their help this article would not have been written. Lastly, we thank those people outside of the museum who contributed greatly to our understanding of this organisation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. In this text we refer to the Van Eesteren Museum, which is the current name of the organisation. Before moving to its new location, the museum was known as the Van Eesterenmuseum, which explains why some references in this article mention this name.
2. See http://vaneesterenmuseum.nl/en/the-museum/about-the-museum, accessed 19 March 2017.
3. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 18 July 2017.
4. See http://www.prowest.nl/, accessed 19 March 2018.
5. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 15 June 2017.
6. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 18 July 2017.
7. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 15 June 2017.
8. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 10 February 2017.
9. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 10 February 2017.
10. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 15 June 2017.
11. The material and the quotes in this section come from the survey we administered to the Van Eesteren volunteers in late spring 2017.
12. These categories are of course extremely problematic and symptomatic of an insidious form of institutional racism since many people included in these statistics are second-generation immigrants who were born in the Netherlands, so, very much in the ‘West’.
13. Interview with the author, Amsterdam, 7 July 2017.
14. Interview with the authors, Amsterdam, 21 June 2017.
15. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 18 July 2017.
16. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 18 July 2017.
17. Interview with authors, Amsterdam, 23 February 2017.
18. The Netherlands Museum Register aims to monitor the quality of museums in the Netherlands. Organisations must meet specific criteria (including business management, collection conservation and public outreach) to register, see Museumregister Nederland 2015. https://www.museumregisternederland.nl/Museumnorm, accessed 10 August 2018.
19. We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for this formulation of the problem.
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Notes on contributors
Anne Beeksma
Anne Beeksma is an Early Stage Researcher within the ‘CHEurope Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe’ Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network. After obtaining her BA and MA (heritage studies) degree at the University of Amsterdam, she is now working on her PhD research on the topic of participatory heritage in the context of urban sites in transformation.
Chiara De Cesari
Chiara De Cesari is an anthropologist and senior lecturer in European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is also part of the CHEurope project. She is co-editor of Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (de Gruyter, 2014) and author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2019) as well as many articles published in journals such as American Anthropologist and Memory Studies. Her research focuses on memory, heritage, and broader cultural politics and the ways in which these change under conditions of globalization, particularly the intersection of cultural memory, transnationalism and current transformations of the nation-state. She is also interested in the globalization of contemporary art and forms of creative institutionalism and statecraft.