The Multiculturalism of a Traditional Economic Region – the Example of the Katowice Conurbation (Poland)

The Katowice conurbation took shape from the end of the 18th century in the borderlands of two states, Poland and Germany. In this sense, it was an area on both their peripheries. Permanent and dynamic interactions between different national-ethnic groups resulted in cultural intermingling. From the middle of the twentieth century, this complex settlement system was already at the centre of socio-economic development on a supra-regional scale. As a result of multidirectional migration, influenced by intensive industrialisation, social relations evolved between the migrants and the local (indigenous) population, as well as between the migrants themselves. The aim of this paper is to analyse the early multicultural nature of selected cities in the Katowice conurbation against a methodological and terminological background and to indicate the extent to which this feature might be an asset in present day socio-economic transformations in this area. The temporal and spatial overlapping of various origins of socio-cultural links and relations leads the authors to formulate the concepts of cultural genotype and primary and secondary cultural genotype, and to exemplify the formation of cultural genotypes in the Katowice conurbation.