Towards New Developments in Making Urban History

The paper focuses on multi-ethnicity in the Mediterranean world as a category of interpretation spanning time and space and the need to re-examine our paradigms. An awareness of a widely diversified urban cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) has led urban history to reflect on the connections and implications generated by the study of the past in relation to memory. Aside from the sense of inadequacy inspired by our conceptualization of unidirectional cultural flows, the professional path towards awareness in our methods of historical research remains complex. A need arises to examine the various kinds of historical knowledge and of analysis which come into play when dealing with such a vast and varied geographical and cultural area and its values. Finally, it seems clear that the acknowledgment of the need to take cultural and ethnic diversity into account in the processes of heritage recognition represents a cultural breakthrough. The polyethnic component of multiculturality as a contribution of groups to the historical and cultural identity of heritage is an element which actually remains to be conceptualized. However, faced with the difficulties of the current multi-ethnic nature of European cities, to overlook the legacy of such a history would be tantamount to an opportunity wasted, if not an act of negligence.