Feel Athens like home I– Getting inspired by the world
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”.
What was clear during our brainstorming for Athens was that even though it’s a city one can love for many reasons its problems originate from the fact that people don’t actually feel it like a home, in terms of respect for the city environment, driving behavior, attention for public property, social awareness and more.
One problem of Athens, which can be noticed in other areas of Greece, is that while people are passionate about the concept of their home country, their love is not extended to behave in the city environment as their own home. So we know that changing the mentality of Athenians is the core goal of this campaign.
Before we realize what needs to be done, we started a journey. We chose to visit the smartest cities of Asia. Tokio is definitely one of them. The city develops “the EcoModel City program since 2008, focuses on energy saving solutions that use low carbon advanced technology. A city that is becoming a choice for many people, needed to center its actions on being eco-friendly and livable and that is its signature.
Singapore was another city that caught our attention — it was its vision to become a smart nation. Singapore recognizes that its asset it its people. So they put the IT knowledge into education, infrastructure and economy. People were educated on using technology and keeping up with it. That is a strong foundation for “smart-awareness”.
Our last stop in Asia was also a weird one. Songdo — A smart city built from scratch. It took $35-billion to create a smart mix of residential, cultural, business, retail, and recreational environments. Even though, a technological achievement like that, is at least admired, it felt that it took us a little bit off course as our search was quite different.
For us a successful Athenian campaign has to be inspired by people-oriented ideas. While technology is the future in making cities smart and sustainable, Athens needs to boost its city-love spirit.
So we came back to Europe. Berlin and its BeBerlin 2008 campaign is a lot closer to us. It was built and its growing based on keeping the community connected. It has a clear message that Berlin is me and it can be you. Because we are the city. Similar approach to the 2005 I Amsterdam campaign that grew even more successful and famous.
Our co-creators pointed out interesting tips about other cities. One that really stood out was Melbourne’s “Urban Forest” project. It is a platform that has registered and named all the trees in the city, with information on their origin, the ways to plant them and grow them and with an email address to talk to them. An ecologically advanced idea to show citizens that we don’t own nature and that nature is alive.
All these places and ideas created a path with many options, only to show us that our initial thought to focus on Athenian people is the right one.
