The ecological turn of the industrial museums. A comparative analysis Britain-China

Museums are undergoing an ecological turn aligned with the current global strategies for sustainable development. This turn is landing in the industrial museum/heritage sector too, notably in Britain and other Western countries, where new environmental concerns and actions are reshaping the way in which the industrial past is represented and used. In this paper, we analyse how this different approach is developing in China. To do so, we take the British experience as a model and combine quantitative and qualitative analyses to study five British and four Chinese cases. We claim that industrial museums have the responsibility to contribute to healing some of the wounds of industrialisation (in this case, climate and ecological damage), which can be achieved through sustainable planning and environmental education.