The museum has been bound up with the emergence of urban civic cultures over the last two centuries. This entry looks at the emergence of the civic, metropolitan, and postmodern museum complexes, with the latter in the context of urban renewal initiatives, and examines how museums are embedded in cities and what urban cultures they support. It draws in the wider development of museum and preserved districts—as in the museum-ification of parts of cities. It connects the changing ways the world is presented in museums with our understandings of the world and the museum as a technology of cultural governance in the city.