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Games, we have been to Sydney before, and we were educated by the people
of the Organising Committee, in very different issues - we have developed a
number of criteria for the projects to be implemented for the Athens case, not
just for the preparation of the athletic event but also for the overall look and
performance of the city of Athens. And those criteria were:
- Does the action or the project have a long-lasting value?
- Does it have a return on investment? I mean, if we invest a lot of money,
are we going to have a return? Back to the city and back to the citizens?
- Does the intervention or the action or the project upgrade the natural
environment? Does it upgrade the historical environment? My city, our city
has a historical environment and heritage that has to be protected at all
cases and with full priority.
- Does the intervention upgrade the urban environment? Again, we are in
a city that has a four million population. It has expanded in the last twenty
years in a manner, which was, not very much well planned, and this is
obvious in the operation of the city.
- Does the intervention provide new employment opportunities and does
it have a positive impact on the gross national product, i.e. on the
economic values, which are also of great interest for the economy of
the country that organises the Games?
So, we have a number of target areas, i.e. planning - how to plan our city -
employment, gross national product and tourism, energy, the national and the
built environment, transport, sport, the historical environment and the look of the
city, and the social dimension.
Let me go through each of these sections, one by one, going first to the lessons
that we got from Sydney and to the actions that are taking place now in Athens for
our Games in 2004. The lessons were to respect town planning. You cannot do the
Games forgetting that the city exists. And it has to develop even without the
Games. The city will be there after the Games. So, you cannot impose solutions
onto the city, which, after the Games, will be catastrophic for the city. You have
to be very careful with that. You have to avoid congestion. You have to develop,
in other words, in the city, free spaces. This is very important, because you are
expecting thousands of visitors who have to move around. And they do not just
go from one neighbourhood to the other. They gather themselves in very specific
places in the cities. Again, use the Olympic Games as a catalyst for urban planning.
So, these were the lessons, in brief, of course.
The actions now. We have developed a planning for Athens, which complies
fully with the master plan, which exists for the development of Athens. We are
developing a network of sites, which are called of metropolitan character, i.e.,
they do not reflect just the needs of the local neighbourhood, but they expand
this dimension in their feeling that these areas will be hosting people from other
neighbourhoods, as well. So, they get more specific characteristics, they get more
advantages. We try to increase the free spaces in Athens. This is a very delicate and
very difficult exercise. Athens is a congested city. Practically, the majority of the
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