‘Connected Museums’ demonstrates how cultural institutions can evolve from places primarily focused on preservation and presentation into places that actively cultivate connection, collective imagination and resilience within the neighbourhoods where they are situated. These are museums that do not stand above or beside their communities, but live within them: open, reciprocal and in continuous dialogue with the life around them.

‘Connected Museums’ is an approach developed by Joke Quintens and Wetopia that invites museums to (re)connect deeply with the neighbourhoods, streets, residents and local communities in which they are embedded. Rather than functioning as isolated institutions, museums are approached as living places that actively contribute to the wellbeing, imagination and future of their immediate surroundings.

Today, the social role of museums is fundamentally changing. Museums are searching for ways to engage broader and more local audiences, to become meaningful civic actors, and to contribute actively to social and urban development. At the same time, many cultural institutions are located within neighbourhoods rich in creativity, knowledge, stories and untapped potential. Connected Museums starts from the belief that museums and neighbourhoods can mutually strengthen one another when they become genuine partners.

The premise is both simple and radical: a museum can only truly flourish when the neighbourhood around it flourishes as well. Museums are part of a district, a city and a social fabric and therefore share responsibility for the relationships and everyday life unfolding there. At the same time, museums hold an enormous wealth of space, knowledge, collections, history and experience that can flow back into the communities surrounding them.

The “Connected Museums” project brings core values such as imagination, care and connectedness into practice. Not through participation as a symbolic exercise, but by genuinely placing residents, young people, artists, staff members, visitors and local organisations in shared positions of ownership and decision-making. In doing so, new forms of collaboration, cultural innovation and collective agency can emerge.

The ambition is clear: a museum that, however international or regional its reputation or reach, remains deeply and uniquely connected to local society. The process is successful when museums and neighbourhoods actively strengthen one another; when the unique potential of a neighbourhood, district or city is unlocked; and when people from the local community are able to take meaningful roles within the museum or cultural space itself.

Wetopia’s “Connected Museums” work so far: 

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa with the project Mobile Museum (2022-2026)

Through the Mobile Museum trajectory with young residents of Khayelitsha, one of the largest townships in Cape Town, youngsters are not treated as audiences on the margins, but as co-creators and co-decision-makers shaping a museum that seeks to become more relevant, accessible and meaningful for the communities around it. By moving both literally and metaphorically into the neighbourhood, the museum becomes an institution that listens, learns and creates together.

Through collaborations between Girls Make the City (in Langa and Athlone) and Zeitz MoCAA, young women and girls connect their struggles and ideas for more safe and happy public spaces in their communities with the content of the museum and the work of the Educational department of the museum.

Coming up / Museum of Modern Art in Oostende, Belgium Mu.ZEE with the project Verbonden Mu.ZEE (2026 & 2027)

Through the Verbonden Mu.ZEE trajectory, more than 250 participants are exploring over two years how the museum can become more deeply rooted in its neighbourhood while allowing its own richness to flow back into the city and region. Through workshops, conversations, encounters and experiments, a new story gradually emerges: a museum that not only exhibits, but also connects, supports, nourishes and renews.

How do we work? 

‘Connected Museums’ works through a regenerative development process grounded in the Power of Place: the unique potential present within a specific location and within the relationships that can emerge there. Through workshops, interviews, interventions, participatory processes and innovative co-creation projects, local residents, visitors, artists, staff members and neighbourhood partners actively contribute to shaping the museum of tomorrow. With our www.publishingpowerofplace.com initiative we turn this fieldwork into shared works, preserving the living knowledge created with all involved.