'Europeanizing' difficult colonial heritage is becoming all the more necessary because the EU is increasingly operating in contexts, relationships and geographies where its deficit towards accepting colonialism as a part of European history – and not just as one parceled out to individual nation-states – is counter-productive inside as well as outside Europe.

ECHOES faces this deficit and proposes to Europeanize colonial heritage by developing new models of engaging with this legacy, both at the level of exploring and developing decolonial entanglements between different European and non-European societies and cities, and at the level of the European Union. We will then further discuss the challenges faced and the solutions chosen in relation to working on a 'methodological toolkit' for a project of this size and heterogeneity more specifically this entails explaining why the toolkit ultimately has taken the form of a collection of 'ECHOES keywords'.ĮCHOES brings together scholars from University of Cape Town, Fudan University (Shanghai), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, University of Coimbra, University of Warzaw, University of Rennes, University of Amsterdam, Aarhus University and University of Hull, to address European colonialism as a complex heritage in European history that has not adequately made it into a public narrative at European level. In this short introduction we will first more fully present the idea, ambitions and structure of the ECHOES project.

Moreover, this shared vocabulary is prerequisite for providing a deeper understanding of colonial heritage in Europe and beyond, through comparisons and contrasts between the many different cases included in ECHOES. Sharing a common theoretical, methodological and analytical vocabulary – developed, discussed and brought into being in and through the joint effort of producing the contents of this 'Methodological Toolkit' – is what secures sufficient cohesion to ground the ambition of engendering cooperation between scholars with different backgrounds and interests. It also demands, however, that the necessary flexibility required by such a heterogeneous field of interests, contexts and approaches, be balanced with a concern for maintaining and facilitating cohesion across the project. The wide interdisciplinary, geographically, cultural and socio-politically localized perspectives as well as its transnational scope and participation is one of the great strengths of ECHOES. The fact that Europe's colonial past is simultaneously present as an undeniable heritage in its cities, institutions and international relationships, and also constantly 'echoed' back to it from the former colonized 'outside' constitutes both the challenge and the promise of the ECHOES project to look for way in which to engage a decolonized future by seeking inspiration in how the colonial past is managed, transformed and worked on by various artistic, political, heritage or civil actors in cityscapes within and beyond the with European continent. The overall aim is to investigate decolonial heritage practices outside Europe in former colonized territories with multiple and different histories of colonialisms as well as to look at decolonial practices inside Europe while keeping in mind the very different trajectories of the different European colonial projects.

ECHOES focuses on various forms and levels of engagements with colonial heritage from local street performances to EU political discourse. The ECHOES project brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and nationalities and entails cases in cityscapes from Asia, Africa and South America and from Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern Europe. This document represents the 'Methodological toolkit' for the Horizon2020 PROJECT ECHOES European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities.

Project echoes of the end