Editoriale

Reinventing the wheel: why museums should learn more about their visitors

di Stefano Monti

Reinventing the wheel: why museums should learn more about their visitors

Have you ever wondered why everybody underlines the relevance of private information and privacy policies? One of the most astonishing answers could be that personal information is important to those who want to sell you a product or a service. Maybe simple. Still, it is everything but simple for museums, apparently. In Italy, there is very poor knowledge about museum visitors, and there is still less knowledge about cultural consumption. In our country, there are always too many reasons that could be suitable to justify a specific condition, and this case is no exception. This lack of knowledge could be the effect of the lack of funding, or, the consequence of the lack of adequate software, or even the organizational structure of the most important Italian museums, where private companies manage all those services where visitors’ data could be collected (such as ticketing) and this condition could cause issues related to the privacy of visitors or give to those operators a commercial advantage. Actually, none of those reasons is decisive: lots of museums have spent, in recent years, significative economic resources to realize research about their visitors; no special software is required to collect basic information about visitors and their cultural tastes and consumption; the realization of a common database could avoid any commercial advantage, and the data-anonymization process could come in handy to protect visitors’ privacy. Since the lockdown Italy strongly prompted the digital development of public services: we’re running digitization projects in almost all the most important spheres of our lives, such as health with the realization of the Electronic Health Record, a database with all our health data, or digital identity, with the so-called SPID (Public System of Digital Identity), which already provides citizens with numerous e-government services. So why we do not have an Electronic Cultural Record? Perhaps it is not such a priority for our museums or policy makers, but it could be a strong tool for both public and private players. Analysing Cultural Consumption Data, private enterprises could produce a more attractive cultural supply, addressing specific products and services to the right audience, and this could increase the overall volume of cultural consumption. Tanks to the potential growth of private revenues, public institutions and other organizations could focus on those “taste-niches” that cannot reach a proper market dimension. Furthermore, cultural organizations could reach the right audiences, strengthening engagement and improving sense of belonging. There are several ways to realize such a system: one of the most intuitive is a specific tax-deduction policy for all the personal expenses related to cultural and creative themes that are paid by a specific debit-card. This kind of system could enable the realization of a specific AI developments, thanks to which, when a person comes to visit a specific museum, the AI could suggest specific guided-visits based on his or her past purchases. It is sad to find that traditional cultural systems are abdicating to the digital supplies all the potentiality of data: in our everyday lives we’re surrounded by services displaying us how likely it is we could appreciate a book, a restaurant, a tv-series or a tv-movie. It could be useful for us to understand how likely it is we could count of such a service also in our physical experiences: going to the cinema, exploring a city, evaluating theatre or music events, or choosing an art – exhibition or a museum. It’s quite simple to understand. Still, it is everything but simple for cultural systems, apparently.

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Metropolis

Large-scale urban regeneration threatening historic urban landscapes. The Liverpool Waters development and the loss of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

di Zachary Mark Jones

The city of Liverpool has undergone repeated processes of urban transformation and urban regeneration over the last half a century. The city has been a test bed for urban experimentation with mass clearance, housing, and relocation schemes in the 1970s followed by culture, event, and heritage-based regeneration strategies from the 1980s through 2000s. Following the perceived success of the 2008 European Capital of Culture and city centre Liverpool One development, an even larger, longer-term, and more expensive development was proposed – Liverpool Waters. Yet unlike its antecedents, which were consciously woven into existing urban fabric and combined multiple strategies and funding schemes simultaneously, the Liverpool Waters approach envisioned a tabula rasa disconnected from its surrounding context and which would also introduce new building typologies to the city – the skyscraper. This article examines the long-term history of urban regeneration in the city and nearly ten-year process of negotiations and redesigns of Liverpool Waters that ultimately led to the deletion of the Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City site from UNESCO’s World Heritage List. This case provides valuable lessons for cities seeking to implement large-scale urban regeneration schemes and the need for strategic and contextually sensitive approaches.

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Tecno-scenari

Instability of the imaginary and media power between old new cultural industries

di Giacomo Buoncompagni

There is a strong perception of insecurity in Italy because of various more or less recent phenomena such as terrorism, immigration, unemployment, and then again, an economic crisis, a pandemic and an unexpected war that never seem to end. Events responsible for serious social instability that, if not well imagined, communicated, and managed distributes cultural and political power to old and new consumer products (re)transforming society into a spectacle perhaps already seen. Faced with this, no institution seems to have the right tools and an adequate political-economic plan to re-establish an acceptable level of social security, or at least to make citizens perceive this. Urban sociology in these cases speaks of ‘social disorganisation’ and this is often followed by ‘individual disorganisation’. The evolution of society, the new electronic and digital media, the phenomenon of globalisation, political-economic changes and the constant and daily representation of crime and violence by the mass media, have strongly influenced human interactions, radically changing the way people relate and communicate, construct and perceive their identity and reality. It is these processes that characterise social transformations and the growth of human egoism, ‘where individuals, in order for violence to be effective, act strategically by striking each other in emotionally favourable conditions’ (Collins, 2014).

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