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The conference ‘Myth of the City’ in Crete brought together 15 poets such as Brendan Kennelly, Paula Meehan, Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Anne Born, Bruno Kartheuser, Pedro Mateo, Sophia Yannatou etc. and 15 planners, architects, philosophers such as Phil Cooke, Juergen Eckhardt, Bart Verschaffel, Anna Arvanitaki, Nikos Stavroulakis.

The need for a new urban agenda became clearer planners started to listen to the poetic approach to cities and realized a poetic imagination of the city has validity, [1] and vice versa poets began to comprehend ideas about urban planning being discussed from a different perspective by urban and regional planners.

Thus the urban agenda becomes crucial for a practical discourse aiming to include the cultural factor in planning.

There were also made some interesting remarks by Socrates Kabouropoulos who pondered why a stranger may love a local place more than the local residents? He made that comment out of his own observations of how many local residents seem to neglect their own environment.

Pedro Mateo, a Spanish poet living in Athens, writing about the ‘reality of streets’:

“The street is a place of passing by, of meeting, of acquaintance. We do not know how the people of Phaistos expressed themselves or if they wanted to be understood, when they walked, or walked past each other, when they gathered to hear the news or to negotiate, when they were just talking and a laughter could be heard…Maybe, apart from the language they didn’t differ so much from us. It is rare that when two or more people meet, they don’t strike a conversation or that they don’t go through the ritual of shaking hands and smiling. This happens even in Athens, a warm and human city which resists the invasion of uniformity.”

and

“In Athens there are many types of streets: The wide, old style boulevards, lined with trees and stately buildings, narrow streets with steps, climbing, because of the morphology of the soil, wary with rocky hills…Athens does not have a monumental character because it was built piece by piece; at one place the commercial center, at another the new town, somewhere else a little insufficient park. Streets dipped in light, alleys lost in the shade, covered passages and markets. Busy streets, deserted streets, practically useless but with a unique charm. The street: a concrete space observed by the vigilant eyes of the windows of the houses.” [2]

It goes without saying that cultural planning without such observing eyes of poets and artists is impossible. A main thesis of this study will be, therefore, how to bring into planning not only culture but those who can express best observations especially when details matter by showing how things are to be understood as a way of life.

[1] For instance, the poetess Paula Meehan spoke about the need for ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ spaces in a city made up only of tamed or planned places, if man is to retain linkage to nature as space free from man’s interventions. The poet Brendan Kennelly spoke about new spaces being like ‘rururb’: neither rural nor urban land but somewhere in-between and therefore without identity. At the same time, Yannis Phyllis from the Technical University of Crete drew attention to the adverse development factor: the more is consumed, the more waste is produced that cities cannot cope with even if developing new methods of waste management. Nikos Stavrolakis, author of the book about Thessaloniki, responded to the destruction of Sarajevo as international city and linked this to the danger of Chania which is neglecting the historical centre by basing economic development only on tourism, thereby neglecting the needs of local residents and in keeping a cultural diverse environment alive.

[2] Pedro Mateo, The reality of the street, (1995) Athens: unpublished materials of the ‘Myth of the City’ conference in the archive of POIEIN KAI PRATTEIN

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