The future and the memory, new identities for the plural city

The essay is connected to the Progetto Pilota RE.LA.TE (Territorial Regional Laboratories) included in the Operazione Quadro Regionale C2C - City to City – Plural identities and urban contexts: new approaches to migratory policies. This project expects an international design Atelier (Territorial workshop in Villa san Giovanni) which experiments with shared design new models able to signify richness and variety of cultures and experiences which characterize dwelling ways in the multi-ethnic city. The essay deals with phenomena related to changes and hybridizations regarding cultural identities, that are not new in the story of mankind, especially in the Euro-mediterranean area, always considered as cultural comparison space between different cultures, which stay there and travel through it since millenniums. But, nowadays, multi-ethnicity is not only a consequence of people movement from a geographic place to another, even if quick cultural changes are due both to the facility in covering long distances in a few time and to new mass media. This causes diffuse connections between cultures and sub-cultures with a speed never tested in the history in so a wide way. At the same time, largely, as a consequence of values clash, previously held relatively isolated by geographic distances, traditional institutions like religious, social organizations and political ideologies, have lost in incisiveness; especially they have lost the capacity to offer that stable identity on a long-term. The essay investigates the possibility to fight this “loss” of stable identity.