Learning from a garden. Reframing sustainability in a participatory community museum

The paper reconsiders the main theoretical and methodological principles of urban heritage and museology from a post-humanist perspective, aiming to view sustainability in community- and territory-based museums from a new angle. This has been carried out through the case study of MUBIG, a territory-based community museum in a Milan suburb. The goal of the paper is to explore the possibilities of engaging with posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism and their implications for heritage management, while simultaneously adhering to the principles and critical aspects of the humanist approach to heritage. Taking a garden as a metaphor as well as concrete open-air museum room, and a “thinking-through-nature” tool, the interpretation of the data gathered through various sources for a year-long period opens up space for the unlearning, or re-learning, of the conventional postulates of museum management in a sustainable key. This process has been shaped into six “lessons” whose key concepts are organicity, relationality, coexistence, grafting, seasonality and slowness.