Promoting Traditions of Multicultural Communities as a Tool for Social Cohesion in Trieste, Italy

We live in an interdependent world where boundaries are loose and people travel and move from one place to the other. This has as a result, societies to be consisted of many different groups, which live together in their everyday lives, are citizens and residents of one community, region, or city. These residents are a significant target group of the city and they need to be based on strong connections with the city. How can then this society operate successfully and promote its distinct characteristics in order to attract not only these residents but also promote its distinct identity so that visitors are aware of these specificities? We argue for the significance of building common elements mutually agreed by the parts involved in a community -place, region, city- in order to bring people together, strengthen multiculturalism while at the same time, retaining the distinct elements of each group that is part of this community. Based on third culture building (TCB) where different cultural groups come together to form a third culture -which incorporates all of them, is common for all and at the same time, these groups retain their distinctiveness-, we argue that this can be successfully implemented from the people involved in planning and management of the related city, place, region which incorporates these groups among its circles. Policy makers interested in planning and evaluating intercultural communication situations could employ those distinct elements, by making combinations that would be of interest to the groups involved, in order to bring these different groups together. What is of interest, is the creation of a shared environment where everyone understands it and is willing to participate in it, under mutual agreement where all sides take part on their own will. A new environment is then created, on common grounds mutually agreed, where the person or group finally decides to participate or not. In that way, the person and the people of the group are the co-creators of value, the person is the ‘agential force’. Taking Trieste, Italy, as a case study, which has a significant number of minorities, Muslim and Christian were analyzed. We examined the relationships they build and particular attitudes they display towards each other. A survey type questionnaire covered half of both groups’ families -the total number of Christian and Muslim families reached 560 families and the sample consisted of 150 Christian Orthodox families and 130 Muslim families-. It was found that people although belonging to different groups can be together attending activities that the outgroup members share as part of their culture while it was found that festivities and activities mainly associated with the culture and mainly religion of the ingroup, did not consist of a connecting bond among these different groups. Implications for local development policies from the host city which accepts the inflow of tourists, immigrants, residents are discussed promoting those elements that are distinct for the new third culture that can bring different groups together, building in that way, an intercultural community. TCB can be employed by practitioners (marketers, tourism policy makers and planners) to bring people who live in the same community and come from different social backgrounds together.