Towards an Ideal Omonia_ 10 days of stories' collection

UrbanDig Project, in an attempt to dig even deeper and understand the needs of Omonia square's users, initiated a week of interviews and behavioral mapping, between 4 and 12 of February.

“What is that people like in Omonia and what should change?”

Starting point? An open, more detailed, discussion on the aforementioned, that took place on Saturday, 4/2 at "En Omonia" café. During this meeting, we finalized the interviews' program and discussed on how the material should be collected, organized and distributed.

During the following week, UrbanDig research community was every day present, trying to collect as much answers and views as possible – based on the following questions:

How would ideal Omonia look like?

What is missing?

What needs to change?

What Can we change?

And what are the existing responses and practices that would worth supporting?

During this week, we met lots of different people (regarding origin, sex, age, work status, relation with Omonia etc) and went out for research sorties with different combinations each time, managing to collect a wide range of material that brings out the remarkable diversity of peoples’ perception of Omonia.

The phase of material collection was completed on Sunday 12/2: A meeting was arranged in order to evaluate the collected material and discuss on the next phase of the procedure.

During this research week, we got to know Omonia, its people and each other better. It made us think more on dominant narrations and enriched our way of conceiving Omonia, contributing to further appropriation of the place.

Part of the collected material was used in the final performance “Omonia Station”, as well as for the creation of the app “The Village Omonia”, along with the Dutch "Company New Heroes". Bas van Rijnsoever represented the group in Athens, during this period.

Photo1 :http://www.freesocial.gr/