Thoughts on Citiness by |Global Citizens|
We are a three-member team of Cultural Management students, interested in Athens’ regeneration through culture and co-creation. Within the context of the workshop “Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project”, hosted by Betty Tsakarestou, we took a journey around the world to explore initiatives, campaigns and cases that apply to vibrant cities and have a message to communicate to the world.
Global citizens a.k.a. Eva Anagnostaki, Ourania Mavriki & Anastasia Rizou
After setting the foundations of our research, we took a world journey starting with Africa, where we took a close look at some of its most promising cities in terms of citiness and pointed out the main challenges a smart city faces, when city planning is not based on the social and cultural nexus. Travelling back to Europe, we examined the BeBerlin campaign to see how a top-down approach can actually interact with a bottom-up process, as Berliners were asked to talk about their city and shape its multifaceted identity. Moving on to Lyon and Madrid we investigated both cities’ efforts to promote a concrete brand image to the world, but we remained skeptical about the space left for co-creation and local community’s involvement. Last but not least, we focused on our own city, Athens! By exploring the city’s assets, challenges and future potential, we designed a strategic plan whose main goals have been to strengthen the local economy, foster social cohesion, reinforce the real purpose of the public space (transforming it into common space) and empower the local communities. At the same time, we designed a communication strategy that addresses the multiple, multicultural and multi-dynamical face of a metropolis like Athens.
During this long and fascinating journey, we not only re.invented our vision for the contemporary city, but we also re.invented ourselves. And we became localists! A new word that enriched our vocabulary to define what our hearts already knew, that “our separate local efforts will add up to collective change“. As Deborah Frieze explains:
“For too long, we’ve convinced ourselves that change will come when someone else figures out how to fix what ills us. But in living systems there are no silver bullets. The truth is we need all of us, to create the conditions for change”.
This new approach comes with two important consequences: We now know that we have the power to provoke change, but we also have the responsibility for it. We are part of a living ecosystem, which -if we can’t change- we can abandon and start over.
But this conclusion is not the end of our journey, in fact it is just the beginning! We are convinced that the future of the cities lays in the real experts of the phenomenon, their citizens!
Designing/transforming/envisioning the city by and for its citizens is neither a naive, utopian assumption, nor an easily feasible accomplishment. But we now have enough tools and knowledge to experiment with the unknown, manoeuvre in this chaordic space and come together, embrace diversity and build on our future, through co-creation, active dialogue and creativity.
You have two choices: Stay tuned or become part of it!
