Mediterranean Voices: oral history and cultural practice in Mediterranean cities (Med-Voices) is a major research project and partnership initiative between London Metropolitan University and thirteen research institutions in the Mediterranean basin. The project, which commenced in June 2002, consists of a neighborhood-based ethnographic investigation into the cosmopolitan oral and social histories of partner cities including Alexandria, Ancona/Split, Beirut, Bethlehem, Chania (Crete), Ciutat de Mallorca, Granada, Istanbul, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Marseille, Nicosia North, Nicosia South, and Valletta. It is an ambitious collaboration which provides unique access to an interactive multi-media and multi-lingual oral history database accessible via the web.

The exhibition Shared Spaces in Times of Crisis: Memories of Alexandria, Ancona, Beirut, Bethlehem and Split introduces four different views of crisis situations as represented by partner cities. It tries to bring home the important message that the movement of populations within Mediterranean shores/Mediterranean cities should occur within a cosmopolitan climate where borders are geographic demarcations rather than boundaries of conflict, hatred, discrimination, marginalisation and poverty. It aims to show how the recent memory of the Eastern Mediterranean, replete with conflict and the ills that conflicts bring on the populations, counters the pluralism that was normally associated with the ancient sea today. It attempts to understand issues of mobility, nostalgia, boundaries and shared spaces, and cultural pluralism and cosmopolitanism, and draw attention to the fact that living together implies a culture of tolerance and exchange where difference becomes an asset rather than a liability, and how sharing spaces is a process that is constantly challenged by considerations of ethnicity, mobility, communitarian allegiances, crises and conflicts.