The “social museum” — a marvellous, whirring engine for social and urban regeneration which has kept all manner of idealists, utopians, thinkers and theorists in lively discussion for decades — is now with us.

And in its wake the social museum has brought what John Holden and Sam Jones of the think-tank Demos describe as “the biggest culture shift in 150 years”.

“Because of the knowledge they hold and the inspiration they offer,” they wrote in a paper for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council two years ago, “museums . . . are essential to our social and economic survival.”

We do not have to look far to find examples of this new thinking about the role of museums. Last year the new International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool, giving not only the history of the trade that had been abolished two centuries before but also the story of slavery today.

“It gave an impulse to start looking at modern reflection,” said Janet Dugdale, director of urban history at the Museum of Liverpool, which will open on the dockside in 2010. “You could do the same for immigration, for economics, for imperialism,” she said.

The new £31 million National Waterfront Museum in Swansea even uses holograms rather than the actual objects to tell stories of Welsh industry but in the context of the post-industrial society.

The museum has made two attempts at attracting Heritage Lottery Fund money. “The first time they were really only interested in the heritage role,” said Steph Mastoris, the museum’s director, “but there was a policy change.” In the event, the HLF made its biggest museum grant, £11 million.

Nottingham Galleries of Justice, a museum that has the national prisons collection, has an alter ego as the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law. It goes into communities in and beyond Nottinghamshire with modules addressing issues that range from antisocial behaviour to arson.

The tiny Ryedale Folk Museum makes connections between its surrounding schools and the immigrant Polish community in North Yorkshire.

A museum devoted to the story of homosexuals to Britain is being planned and may open as soon as 2011, possibly in King’s Cross.

In the centre of Brixton the Black Cultural Archive is planning a museum for 2010 in a former Liberal club that will tackle head on the problems of the community whose origins are overwhelmingly AfroCaribbean.

“Crime is a big issue here, drugs is a big issue, environmental quality, how places are used are issues here,” says its director, Paul Reid, and though he avoids the word “ghetto”, lest the community feel marginalised and discounted, he says: “I want the project to make that margin confident enough to come out of the shadows.”

There is now an audible museum voice, says Janet Dugdale: “The museum voice is our response as curators, but we must enable other voices to be heard. A city museum has to have many voices.”

Simon Tait’s paper, Can Museums Be a Potent Force in Social and Urban Regeneration? is published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in its Viewpoint series, www.jrf.org.uk