Mediterranean Voices:
Oral History and Cultural Practice in Mediterranean Cities

The project Mediterranean Voices: Oral History and Cultural Practice in Mediterranean Cities, funded by the EU under its EuropAid/Euromed Heritage II programme, has brought together a network of academics and activists in an exploration of tourism and heritage across the Mediterranean and their relationship to nationalism and other sources of identity. In particular, the main aim of the project was to record personal memories telling of the routine pleasures and difficulties of sharing urban space in the historically cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.

The 14 collaborating teams working in 13 different Mediterranean cities therefore had to look critically at heritage as a political/cultural category: what becomes heritage, how it gets selected, what gets left out, and the consequences for the neighbourhoods, for urban planning and for cultural tourism. The cities represented in our network offer a range of situations and issues that illustrate this dynamic:

• Marseille, Ancona and Alexandria, all port cities which are important transit zones for the Mediterranean, despite the declining importance of maritime links for mobility around the Mediterranean;
• Nicosia, Beirut and Bethlehem, just emerging from, or still deeply embroiled in, long years of conflict;
• Istanbul, Chania and Granada, whose cosmopolitan pasts, reflected in the multi-layered heritage of the built environment, are at odds with the dominant mono-ethnic public culture of the present and the attempts of new 'ethnic minorities' to find a place within it;
• Ciutat de Mallorca, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Valletta, in Malta, where tourism is one of the forces driving the 'gentrification' of sections of the city at the expense of the marginalized communities who live there; and, finally,
• London, a major centre of Mediterranean diaspora communities, and nourished by enduring close links with the region.

The project has been innovative in both the size and scale of the collaboration, and in the methodology it employed. The central output of the project is an on-line multi-media database, fully searchable in all the nine languages of the project, making the material accessible to both specialist and general publics (cf. www.med-voices.org). In addition, multiple exhibitions and events have been carried out in each of the cities. With its focus on the neglected urban heritage of the Mediterranean, and the muted voices of its neighbourhoods, the project is also working with local user groups to support innovative and inclusive approaches to the teaching of local history and to cultural and spatial policy.

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