A New Vegas or An Ever-changing Polis?
A Perspective of Athens in the New World
At the beginning of 2018, while studying Cultural Management at Panteion University, one of our graduate courses got us thinking about cities. Under the lead of Professor Betty Tsakarestou, who is the project initiator of the Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project we started discussing ways to make our city more sustainable, smart, open and better for the people that inhabit it.
Our team (Karolina A. Mackiewicz, Maximos S. Theo. and Ioanna Kakalidi) was challenged to study cities around the globe in order to understand what it is we as cultural managers can do to create a better future for the city we live in.
We case-studied the Global YouthfulCity Index, we evaluated Athens for its strengths and potential and we got in touch with two initiatives in the city and learned about the ways they re-brand and co-create Athens (Impact Hub, Serafio).
Created by Aristomenis Theodoropoulos
“So tell the sun to find a new road”
-Odysseus Elytis, Ásma iroïkó ke pénthimo […]
Athens is like a little planet. You can find anything and any kind of people in it. The bright blue sky aglow above the grey concrete roads and apartment buildings, residences in neoclassical rhythm, ancient sites, new cultural centers and the Athens metro — which is considered among the world’s top — coexist in one city. Maybe both the romantics and the futurists would have been jealous. But the metropolis of Greece also lacks in many ways.
Modern day metropolis doesn’t extend only in a local level; but it expands globally. The networks of communication and transportation, such as tourism or the biggest of cultural industries have embedded the microcosmic composition of the new polis: the peak for technological innovation and communication amusement.
But here also lies (cultural) globalization. In his second book, Dave Eggers through the eyes of the protagonist who flies with his friend around the world cities acknowledges the hybridization:
“Growing up I thought all countries looked, were required to look completely different […]. But every country now seemed to offer a little of every other country, and every given land scape, I finally realized existed somewhere in the US”.
And here is the chance to ask ourselves what kind of city and culture we want to feature. Do we want a “despacito” tourism? Do we want to show only the glorious ancient past or to bring out, along with it, the contemporary cultural forces of Athenians? A weak and easy commercialized hybrid city that will seem like a new Vegas? Or a (co-)competitive polis which can be creative and constructive?
We believe that the more commercialized a city is, the less unique it tends to be*. We have choked on huge aspirations before.
In this hypermodern era — where everything coexists — we can choose our own cosmos to adjust in a metropolis like Athens.
girl tries to shoot the afternoon’s moon. Photo: Maximos S. Theo.
Athens has all the potential to become a cultural reborn polis
New big cultural centers** have brought a modern cultural creativeness and sensitivity. Start-up companies that act as a (cultural) force in the city’s narrative (see Impact hub). Many cultural events take place around the city every week — from music festivals and lives to every kind of art exhibition or workshop one can think of. Quite a few museums and sites show the ancient heritage or modern art. Numerous cinemas and theatres are spread throughout the city neighborhoods filling our minds and senses with images and words.
Of course we must not forget the creative labor of Athens. A lot of young Athenians have embraced a cultural awareness. People who work in cultural industries and talented new artists — along with citizens who want to take part in the cultural happenings and business — have emerged with a vital pathos for art and culture.
We should also mention the driving force of Attica/Athenian light of the “Sovereign Sun”. It isn’t the urban myth of it, nor some naturalistic approach. It’s the attestation and the expression that often characterizes a cinematic or photographic image, creation, ways of entertainment and the people’s life in general.
What we need
Unity, uniqueness, agenda, production. Athens lacks a cultural policy that could have as goal the protection of authenticity and the easier and more innovative production. The contemporary culture has been degraded. We need to utilize all the potentials mentioned above in the most creative way, as well as the abandoned buildings and regions, where there’s space for experimentation.
The improvement of Athens must be a personal matter of its citizens through cooperation and respect to the land. Nothing can be achieved without the active participation of Athenians; without the optimism of the will.
There is need for a stronger cultivation of cultural self-awareness that understands and assesses anything that happens on the surface of our spheroid. The future stands in an essential self-awareness and distance from who we are.
Today that cities scale everything around us, it’s possible to see the rise of the society of polis — a nation society. Athens can play a major role as a metropolis; and each Athenian can be what Baudelaire called the “spiritual citizen of the universe”, in an ever-changing polis.
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* As a counterexample we can see David Harvey’s Spaces of Capital (2001), where he argues how the collective symbolic capital of Barcelona, which has its basis in the alternative local culture and in the cultural heritance of Gaudí , became a product of exploitation from the profiteers of the real estate.
** See Serafio, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Onassis Foundation, Cacoyannis Foundation, Greek Film Archive Foundation etc.
