Feel Athens like home III — Visualizing it
We are Katerina Michalentzaki & Zuzana Hájková and we teamed up for the Athens co-creation city branding project by our professor Betty Tsakarestou.
This is our journey towards understanding Athens and its potentiality to be smart, sustainable and attractive. We started by discovering Asia, stopped in Europe, took some tips from America and Australia and we came back to Athens to make people “feel it like home”.
Creating the campaign “Feel Athens like home” we questioned our every thought. If this is a project that will connect citizens of Athens and make them engage, then even the name should not be decided by us.
The first step to communicating the campaign can be a social media contest on the best name that combines Athens and Home. But let us give you more information on its core.
Why?
The “FALH” project will reverse the image of the city in the citizens’ minds. We strongly believe that any smartness of the city, any technology adapted and any government’ motivation, will follow a path of an aware citizen who sees their city as their own.
What?
The basic implementation of “FALH” is going to be an app. The app will be divided by general topics (clean city, illegal, parking, criminality etc), groups (mothers, students, pet owners, bikers, etc) and by group topics — what each group wants to solve. It will be designed to demonstrate problems and solutions and the goal is to create a network of people, administrations, organizations and businesses that will connect, exchange, interact and solve problems together.
Who?
The executor of the campaign could be a nonprofit entity that consist of The Athens Co Creation City Branding Project and volunteers that can provide time, content, services, material, know-how and more. It is a community project and the community will have a reason to be engaged.
A question that troubled us a lot is what will make someone get involved, use the app, and communicate their issues of the city through that. The answer was “win — win”. We can create initiatives like discounts for app users to partner businesses or an exchange platform for services or products among users or contest and awards for problem solvers. Additionally events and organized themed activities are always crowd magnets.
The key towards success though is endorsement. When the Municipaliy, the National Tourism Organization, the airport, official unions and associations acknowledge the campaign and support it, the “FALH” project will be whole, it will embrace the city and its people and they will evolve towards feeling that our home is not margined by its walls.
Visualizing the campaign
Our campaign is people-oriented. We dreamed of creating leading stories of every day people who state what it means to feel your city like home. It is
The Athenian mother
The Athenian businessman
The Athenian biker
The Athenian investor
The wannabe Athenian
It is all of us who will present our problems living in the city and the same “us” who will be represented by the “FALH” to communicate and resolve them. It is us who will tell our story about what it takes for us to feel Athens like home.
Feedback
This may be a start up branding project, but it also has a potentiality to be created in reality and remain sustainable. The initial crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is all it takes for content creating and primary communication needed. In the long run the whole campaign can be connected with other campaigns, merchandise, get ads, sell content and organize events. It can be a complete program that can succeed to creat citizen awareness, tranform Athens to a city that is taken care of by its people, offer job opportunities and educational courses and connect the community.
Feel free to comment, criticize and give us your thoughts to help us enrich the “Feel Athens like home” campaign.
