BIG CITY, BIG IDEAS: Cities, Museums, and Soft Power

Museums are the sleeping giants of cities – fast becoming a major urban force, helping cities to attract people and investment, and address challenges such as inequality, social exclusion and sustainability. This is the Big Idea from internationally renowned cultural planners Gail Lord and Ngaire Blankenberg, in their new book Cities, Museums and Soft Power. In this presentation, they discuss how and why museums and cities can work together to activate their soft power – influence through attraction, persuasion and agenda-setting.

• Museums occupy (and create) some of the most prestigious real estate in the city;
• They are city place-makers;
• They are public and trusted spaces, attracting and bridging diverse people around common interests.

In their talk, Lord and Blankenberg also touched on the soft power opportunities for Toronto, a city that hovers at the edge of global leadership.

SPEAKERS

Gail Dexter Lord is Co-President of Lord Cultural Resources – the world’s largest museum and cultural planning consultancy, which she founded with Barry Lord in Toronto in 1981. Lord Cultural Resources has completed more than 2,100 assignments in 55 countries on 6 continents. Gail’s clients have included the Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto’s Luminato Festival, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, Louvre Lens, The Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Lowry in Salford, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Chicago Cultural Plan. In 2014, Gail was appointed Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Minister of Culture of France.

Ngaire Blankenberg is a Principal Consultant at Lord Cultural Resources. She has been a youth worker, jazz poet, cartoonist, documentary-maker, television producer and is co-founder, with Stephanie Nolen, of the Museum of AIDS in Africa. She has advised clients such as the Canadian Museum of History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Parlamentarium, the Nigerian National Museum, Constitution Hill (Johannesburg), the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Dharhan), National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, WTown Beijing, the Historic District of Dubai and Barangaroo, Sydney. Ngaire grew up in Winnipeg, Harare and Christchurch, and has lived and worked in Johannesburg, Toronto, Paris and Barcelona.