ABSTRACT
City museums convey a process of the 'heritagisation' of urbanity by identifying urban artefacts and imagery to be protected, and by creating a certain public image of the city by exhibiting it through the materiality of artefacts. This chapter focuses on qualitative field study in and around the city museum of Noyon located in the Oise department of Picardy in northern France. It describes the changing role of city museums over the past century or so. The chapter also focuses on the renewal of the museum in the early 1990s: it will show how this time of transition turned out to be a failed attempt to build a more 'inclusive' vision of urban heritage. It argues that this failure is explained less by conflicting visions of heritage between amateurs and professionals (inhabitants vs. curators) than by the selective, local tradition of heritage-making in which it is rooted, and that it also reflects the social and political organisation of the community.
