City histories revealed

e-cities is a concept for a system that would bring research knowledge of the cultural heritage, in particular the history of cities, into popular use. The idea was developed as a model of multi-lingual cultural content management and dissemination. The system could be implemented as a fully functional and reproducible system applicable to any city, anywhere. Much of the technology is being or has been developed for use in other applications. It would offer important political, economic and cultural benefits. This paper explores the technologies that would be required and identifies those that are available and developing. It puts the case that an e-cities system is not just desirable but, increasingly, necessary.The basis for the idea for e-cities is the proposal for a DEER, a Distributed European Electronic Resource, which was developed as part of the work of E-Culture Net, a project in the EC 5th Framework Programme (Keene, S. and Monti, F. 2003). The DEER would provide a mulitilingual information environment that would offer access to digital materials for the whole of European culture.