The case of Athens by |Global Citizens|
We are a three-member team of Cultural Management students, interested in Athens’ regeneration through culture and co-creation. Within the context of the workshop “Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project”, hosted by Betty Tsakarestou, we took a journey around the world to explore initiatives, campaigns and cases that apply to vibrant cities and have a message to communicate to the world.
*Global citizens a.k.a. Eva Anagnostaki, Ourania Mavriki & Anastasia Rizou
We’ve travelled to Africa, Berlin, Lyon and Madrid, a world tour that offered us a useful feedforward for our final destination, our own city! After all these adventures we decided that it was about time to focus on Athens and envision the city’s transformation, through its own, unique assets.
So, what is the biggest challenge that Athens faces?
We feel that Athens’ image is stuck to its glorious ancient past and its whole brand is built around the ancient times, an approach that has been perpetuated by official authorities, during the last decades. Furthermore, the recent economic and social crisis that Greece faces, has affected the quality of every day life in the city. At the same time, there is political and social distrust and people increasingly lose their self-belief, with devastating impact on society. As a result, the city’s social cohesion is in danger.
What we want to do?
We want to reconstruct the image of the city through a novel strategy that focuses on the unique cultural traits of Athens, through the citizens’ engagement.
As a starting point for our explorative journey to Athens, we created a mindmap, where we tried to indicate the multifaceted character of the city, composed of small precious singularities. This visual representation of Athen’s main characteristics proved to be a helpful tool for our deeper understanding of the city’s potential, while it became the basic canvas of our strategy development.
However, a mindmap with the perspective of only three Athenians was not enough for us. That’s why we left our comfort zone behind and started a field research, by interviewing Athenians, who had successfully hacked the system, by presenting alternative professional opportunities, in the city of Athens and beyond. We ended up with four interviewees, each one of whom gave us valuable feedforward about what the city means to them and what its greatest potential is.
We’ll introduce them to you:
~ Evangelia Koutsovoulou, founder of Daphnis and Chloe, which is a culinary herb company
~ Argyro Barata and Niki Vouimta, founders of FEAST, a team organising live crowfunding events
~ Dimitra Paraskevopoulou, founder of Ava’s Farm, an online marketplace for greek products
~ Alison Damianos, founder of The Meet Market, which is a nomadic marketplace, with various goods and parallel events
After completing the interview process and before starting the design of our strategic plan, we felt the need to form a group of values that would be our guides in creating an effective strategic plan, that reflects both our city’s assets and personal visions.
Last but not least, we focused on the key-stakeholders of the city, in order to define their nature, the challenges they face and their own interests. This step proved to be important as in every urban strategy it is a key activity to identify the different interest groups that form the city’s core. Key stakeholders included citizens, local authorities, real estate, investors, media, visitors and more.
All of the above have formed a strong basis for our strategic plan development. So, with our mindmap, interviewees’ feedforward and values at hand, we started forming a strategy that would transform the city of Athens, our city!
You can watch the presentation of our work here.
Stay with us and “Let’s re.invent Athens”
