What about Athens?

Hi! We are Maria Kalogeropoulou, Alexandra Koroxenidi, Chris Ntabakakis and Evi Stoubou or in other words “City Flaneurs” and we are part of Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project.

We just completed our tour in the smart cities of the world. We now end up in our city, Athens.

We will try to apply what we learned from the other cities on our own to make it more sustainable and livable. That means that we will try to seek the main issues that make the everyday life problematic in Athens and find a simple idea that will provoke — like a domino effect — more changes in other significant domains.

So we started thinking our life in the city by asking simple questions· what is wrong in our city, what do we like and what we don’t, what do we want to change, what is the problem that we face the most? We asked ourselves many times these questions trying to see the bigger picture, as we did when studying the smart cities in Europe and America. And after we got close to the bigger picture we wondered, what is the basic need, the one that concerns the majority of citizens and effects the life in the city.

We listed many things missing and several problems that need to be fixed. We also tried to keep our minds focused on the efforts that can be done by the citizens, the bottom-up way, as we believe that the radical changes are the ones that come from the state of mind of the citizens. That was a real challenge, to think of something simple but effective that can be accomplished without any government assistance.

Athens is a city that offers the appropriate ground to think of city strategies that will radically change our life in the city. Apart from a very beautiful and vivid city, there are many difficulties in many fundamental domains, such as health care, transportation, traffic congestion, infrastructure, safety and pollution. So we gathered several times brainstorming on a city plan that will solve the problems on at least one of these domains.

Click here to check our proposal for a smart city campaign!

Athens Panteion City Flaneurs Athens City Branding