Feel Athens like home II — Thinking about 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”.
Athens is a fantastic city. It stays in motion 24/7. Athenian people feel they have options in Athens and they really enjoy it. We are not talking about the typical things that you will find anywhere in Greece, but the city’s ability to grow and evolve around different contexts — picturesque neighborhoods in the center that remain timeless, new hip places for every taste, art and culture that mix classic, modern and alternative concepts, fancy and simple locations. It attracts so many people because everyone can find themselves somewhere in the city.
An ugly picture of Athens though, is the one with the dirty streets and buildings, smoking in public areas, difficulty to move as a pedestrian, driver or biker, few green spots, lack of security in some neighborhoods and unfortunately many more. And most of these problems are associated with behavioral issues and luck of respect. It is known that the public sector and the authorities in Greece do what they can with the means and the motive they have, and it is not enough. But a campaign about Athens has to be created to become an interactive tool for everyone, not just a guide book about what the state has to do.
Thinking all that we continued discussing what we feel living here. Both new in Athens, both loving it and both feeling the need for a change of mentality. Since people don’t respect their city as much as their home, how about a campaign that puts the name of Athens next to the word “home”?
The concept is simple. The “Feel Athens like home” campaign will fill the city with messages. The Athenians will get accustomed to the word association “Athens + Home” and hopefully will remind them of the behavior they have at their home. At the same time, this campaign about can be adapted for touristic promotion to tell the world that Athens is open, relaxing, comfortable, familiar, alive, and homey.
Where do we begin?
Prague was another inspirational city for a project that used the perspective of homeless people to describe their city. That project was a good trigger for research. We thought that the story of “Feel Athens like home” has to be formed by individuals and groups that have specific needs living in the city. We needed to see the city from the eyes of its people.
The first two focus groups were foreign people who live here and parents. Those are two significant groups of citizens. Foreigners have chosen this city for multiple reasons, work, family, change of scenery, but they have experiences from living in other countries. Parents on the other hand, have the challenges of moving around the city with their children, and observe all the aspects of living in Athens, like safety, comfort, traffic and opportunities.
Well the results told us the truth we expected:
Yes to Athen’s options, people, weather, nightlife.
No to the dirty streets, bad transportation, strikes and luck of safety.
But how would the campaign look like?
