Reconsidering urban development: the role of local self-organized groups in urban open green space upgrade

Abstract

In the city of Thessaloniki, the co-creation of ‘an inclusive city’, which will ‘empower citizens and community-led projects... and enable co- creation in open and public spaces’, appears as one of the four main goals of the Resilience Strategy of the city, ‘Thessaloniki 2030’, published in 2017. Within this frame, and in conjunction with the need of open green spaces that Thessaloniki has, this paper is an attempt to identify and highlight the contribution of design self-organized groups to the upgrade of the urban environment of the city of Thessaloniki. This study focuses on the design team of Ev Zin (Ευ Ζην), an initiative of a group of students from the School of Spatial Planning and Development, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Aristotle’s University main campus occupies a large area within the city of Thessaloniki. This campus, particularly its various open spaces appear to be in a general degraded state, frequently used for delinquent activities. A group of students decided to act and to focus on the upgrade of the open green spaces of the campus, starting from a specific green space, situated at a focal point/crossroads within the campus. These students formed the Ev Zin group. This paper will be, hence, discussing the conditions that led to the degradation of the campus and the area around it, the formation of this team and its development, but more importantly the efforts of the Ev Zin group towards the upgrading of the campus, as well as the mobilization that these efforts have created, particularly concerning the principal formal stakeholders, mainly the Aristotle University’s authorities and the Attiko Metro authorities, the company constructing the underground stations at the university