Serafeio
Sports,Culture and Innovation in the center of Athens
“This is Athens!” is the main vehicle with which the municipality tries to construct an undivided branding for the city of Athens, both for the residents and the visitors. They try to create a storytelling that is going to connect all the separate cultural activities taking place in Athens, creating this way a uniform narration about the Greek capital.
Under the umbrella of this there are many projects running, such as the reconstruction of Serafeio in Gazi that we are going to examine in this article. Those attempts include both independent departments of the municipality as well as important stakeholders in the field of Culture in Greece.
Serafeio is a former swimming center which is aspirant of being the next sport, cultural and innovational center of the Greek capital. It is one of the biggest projects of the municipality of Athens under the umbrella of “This is Athens” that tries to combine three of the most important pylons of development in general, as we named them before. Being located in Gazi makes it really easily accessible by metro or bus. Also it is open for the public every day, so that even those who work can visit it on their days off. There is no specific age group that Serafeio is addressed to, as there are many interesting activities for kids and adults as well.
This stunning complex is the home for many educational programs, innovational projects, a huge swimming pool, courts, conference halls and many other things in order to achieve its main goal which is to make life for Athenian residents a little easier, a little better and with more opportunities when it comes to culture, sports and innovation.
In this context we got in touch with the relevant office of the municipality of Athens that runs the project of Serafeio and “This is Athens!” in general, taking into consideration that we care about Athens City Branding as well and we wanted to contact important stakeholders so that they can share their experience with us. They told us about the effort that they are putting into this project, the agony that they have because they want it to succeed and the difficulties that they are facing everyday such as bureaucracy, lack of budget and lack of cooperation with other organizations. Also many problems that they are facing have to do a lot with general characteristics that the capital of Greece or even Greece has in general, as we expatiated them in another article of this series: “Athens: the good the bads…and the ugly truth about Greece’s capital”. As an example we can mention the economic crisis that has affected Greece, or the general lack of collaborations that we detected in our research.
After all we think that the success or the failure for this specific project, or any similar attempt in general has to do more with the repercussion that this has and the effort that the participants are putting into understanding what “audience” wants. Also the ending results are associated with the achievement of cooperation between all the stakeholders in order to create a uniform “storytelling” and branding about Athens, so that not everyone can say “This is Athens!” but “This is SO Athens!”
This research and article are part of Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project in the context of MA in Cultural Management of Panteion University under the lead of Mrs B.Tsakarestou as a professor.
