museum of everyday urbanism

a digital platform for mapping Thessaloniki

The public space experience is a multisensory one. The object of design is a web platform for the collective mapping of the center of Thessaloniki, Greece, that attempts to  collect all these senses. It can be described as a digital museum of the city’s everyday qualities and textures. Furthermore, it reacts  as a tool to facilitate the self-organization and realization of initiatives concerning actions and interventions to the public space. At the first page of the platform, the users can explore a digital three-dimensional structure that takes place above the city center’s map and bears the existing entries that have the form of image, video, sound or text. The page where these entries are posted after being geographically defined is following, as well as a page where you can search them using filters as region, category or key words. Additionally, there is a page for posting open calls for actions or interventions, in which the intentions,the purposes and the needs of the initiative are being declared, so anyone interested could help, in a crowdsourcing way. Finally, there is a page dedicated to gathering useful theoretical and practical info associated with the city and its transformation like bibliography, manuals of DIY urbanism and interventions, maps with the available empty buildings or human resources, and has the purpose of activating the users to participate in the production of public space. Our goal is to encourage practises of observation and experimentation with the urban life elements, ludic behaviors of exploring, wandering and socializing because we believe in equal rights in the access and the occupation of the city as a common good and a region of constantly collective production. We hope that this platform will gather observations and reflections concerning the city, it will accommodate the sharing of our common experiences, as well as it will be a tool for the organization of small scale interventions and realization of initiatives for the creative transformation of the public space.