Safe ways
paving the way for accessibility in Athens
1. What is our topic and why did we choose it?
Our group chose to focus on the accessibility challenges faced by people in Athens affected by disabilities, especially those who are blind or use wheelchairs. With the realization that many streets and buildings in the Greek capital are not accessible for everyone, we were motivated to do research on the topic. Especially the side streets and neighborhoods apart from the center are extremely hard to navigate. Our main goals were to learn more about this topic, spread awareness and talk critically about the situation. We want to promote an inclusive society by highlighting the need for better accessibility in streets and buildings in order to break down the barriers between people with disabilities and the rest of society. By seeing the world through the eyes of affected individuals, we can create a more understanding and inclusive community. That’s why we chose this topic — to make a positive impact on accessibility and promote empathy in our society. Social inclusion should be made possible for all. It promotes equal opportunities for everyone, as well as economic equality. It also concerns human dignity to be able to participate at every term of society. And lastly it contributes to social stability. (Gidley, J., Hampson, G., Wheeler, L., & Bereded-Samuel, E. (2010):4)
2. Who are we? What’s our concept idea?
Safeways, is a student cooperation, which consists of six international Erasmus students from Belgium, France and Germany. We came together as a student organization because we are all interested in the topic and, due to our different backgrounds, we were able to draw a good comparison between the situation here in Greece and that in our home country. We particularly noticed that the infrastructure is definitely in need of improvement and therefore excludes many people from participating in everyday life. This could be anyone, but we were thinking of people with a disability in general. As the topic is very broad, we wanted to narrow it down by focusing our project on blind people and people in wheelchairs. In terms of infrastructure, we focused on the sidewalks, traffic light crossings and signals that are in need of improvement in Athens. Our main goals are raising awareness of the topic in society and to learn something new about the topic ourselves also by comparing the situation in Athens with that in our home countries.
As a low budget student organization we have limited resources. Our general concept idea was to first create a podcast together, which was primarily aimed at other students. Since creating a high-quality podcast turned out to be very complicated and time-consuming, we decided to create an Instagram reel in which we present our most important collected facts, pictures and interview sequences. To support this, we created a website where some of the information could be read in more detail. It was a long journey until the project finally became what it is today. What exactly the process was like, what the exact content, difficulties, new solutions and the final reflection were, will be explained in more detail later in the essay.
3. Making of process / What did we do exactly
The creation of our organization and our content went through different steps. In order to raise awareness, we found that the best way to do it was by taking some photos/videos of what stunned us in Athens’ streets. Thus, we had a lot of proof of what the issues in the city of Athens looked like regarding accessibility. Then, we decided to inform ourselves about why the situation was like that, what has been done for it, and what will be done to address the current situation. We found a lot of interesting stuff on the internet, but what we lacked was a perspective from a local person. That’s why we wanted to record an interview with a Greek person who could relate to the situation of disabled people in Athens. Therefore, we had the chance to talk with a woman living in Athens who has been able to give her point of view and her opinion about the topic. After having collected all that information, we had enough to post some content on our social media and our website. We posted the photos/videos that we took on Instagram, and we put a lot of further details on our website about key definitions, the reason why Athens is like that, some other organizations like us, solutions… But, the best content that we created was our video of 3 ’30. In it, there is a montage of some photos and videos with a voice-over talking about our organization, the situation of the streets, and disabled people in Athens. Of course, some extracts of the interview are included in it, which permits a really good raising awareness video.
4. Challenges
The first and biggest problem we stumbled up on was finding interview partners. Since we were all Erasmus students it was very difficult for us to use connections or find someone in Athens willing to do an interview. We E-mailed a lot of people and did not get a reply. After Emailing around twenty people, only one was happy to help us out. And the coordination for a time for that interview was difficult because our partner had a very different schedule than us. In general the different schedules even within our group made it difficult sometimes. Most of the time we couldn’t all find a time to meet so some people worked from home while others met up, which worked pretty well in the end.
In the beginning we planned to do a podcast but since it was so difficult to find voices through interviews we had to cancel that plan and instead did a video which we decided pretty late and therefore it was a little bit stressful because we had to have everything completely done before we could do the video.
In general the topic of accessibility in Athens was a difficult topic because it seemed as if it isn’t a topic people in Athens talk about much and therefore it was hard to find good sources and information that focused on Athens streets.
5) Solutions and reflections
As said before, one of the bigger challenges that we face as a team of Erasmus students was simply finding resources and people that could help us with our project. The main way we tackled this issue, other than just sending more emails, was to find resources in ourselves. We did our best to find reliable information on the internet but if that information wasn’t available then we would find it ourselves on the street. If the information we were looking for wasn’t reachable through our own research then we would work around it by either changing direction or by making an educated guess of that information we needed.
The podcast is a good example of this, when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to make the podcast happen, we decided to change our medium and to instead make an Instagram real with the content that we wanted to put in the podcast.
In general, I believe we all learned a lot from this experience. It taught us to be more flexible and to see solutions outside of the boundaries we first fixed ourselves. It was a good way to experience and explore what it means to be social innovators. Now that the project is done I can say that even though it was hard at times, I’m happy we went through and got to the finish line, I hope our project will inspire others and reach its goal of spreading awareness about accessibility around the city.
6) Advice for future innovators/ how would it look like in real world
As students who worked on a project to improve accessibility in Athens, the advice we can give to future people wanting to make this project work and get it to where we wanted it to be but couldn’t would be to find out about Athens city policy and what they have tried to do or not, and if so, what difficulties they may have encountered. In short, to make a report to have all the data in their hands before tackling the renovations.
In addition, we have identified the crucial role of the media and politics in improving the situation. The media can play an important role in raising public awareness and disseminating information on accessibility issues, so that the municipality will give in if necessary.
More concretely, we need to put in place an urban planning system that prioritizes the installation of ramps at intersections, wider and flatter sidewalks, and elevators in public places to guarantee physical accessibility for wheelchair users and those with reduced mobility.
Develop navigation applications specifically designed for blind and partially-sighted people, providing detailed information on accessible routes, potential obstacles and nearby services. This will make it easier to locate problems within the city.
This project was made in the context of the class Social Issues, Social Innovation and Corporate responsability by professor Betty Tsakaretsu.
Safe ways team, Feyo, Luca, Sarah, Charlélie, Claire and Nils.
Bibliography
Gidley, J., Hampson, G., Wheeler, L., & Bereded-Samuel, E. (2010): Social Inclusion: Context, theory and practice. The Australasian Journal of University Community Engagement, 5 (1), 6–36. https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Social-inclusion-Context-theory-and-practice (19.02.24)
