Translator: Panagiota Prokopi Reviewer: Chryssa Takahashi
Hello, everybody!
Taking into consideration today's theme, Evolution,
I could start talking about the city's evolution,
its prospectives, the country's prospectives in general.
Then it would basically be a speech on politics.
We are fed up all those years
listening to political debates and speeches, analysis.
So I thought it would be more interesting,
since I am the last speaker,
to talk about my own evolution,
about how and why I met with politics.
I met with the city.
I will make a short flashback in the past.
The incident which I believe scarred me for life
was the early death of my father.
My father died at the age of 50, in 1967.
He died suddenly due to acute myocardial infarction.
I was 13 years old back then.
My beloved mother, she could not refill this gap.
She was a very sweet but rather weak person.
I think she did the exact opposite.
This fact, this trauma,
she made it look like an irreparable catastrophe that struck the family,
and she advocated insecurity and uncertainty.
There was another issue for me.
I guess that my sisters had other issues, we have never really discussed it.
But for a 13-year-old boy, there is the following matter:
Boys are growing, they evolve, they build their characters,
their personality, their values, their role models,
by observing mainly their father.
This never happened to me
because my father was a captain in the merchant navy
and he was always absent, he was always travelling,
and secondly, death came afterwards,
so this absence was made an irreversible event.
This gap was filled by my mother in a way -
in a weird manner, though -
my mother had idealised my father,
she was constantly presenting him as a magnificent personality in every way.
He was bold, risky,
self-made, competent.
Generally, this image was ideal.
I could not help but start to identify with this image.
So, I form an image for myself,
that I will become a captain, not necessarily in the merchant navy,
but that I will be somewhere and I will be constantly traveling.
Of course, as you see, the beginning of this journey
has enough pain and insecurity.
The idea and reality of traveling was not unfamiliar to me.
I was born in America,
we lived there with my family until I was five years old,
we came back to Greece,
I stayed in Greece for a couple of years,
afterwards some members of my family had to travel in Japan.
I stayed there for a year.
I came back.
When I was ten
they placed me in a boarding school, against my will.
I was rather an unhappy boarder, from the age of 10 to 13,
and I left the boarding school, after my father had already died.
Of course there is a perpetual motion within this space.
I had already travelled a lot since the age of 13.
Since I was a kid, I had the feeling that I was not only Greek,
but a citizen of the world.
But there is all this emotional motion.
You change environment, you change friends, you change places.
I believe that all these have contributed to the development
of a somewhat emotional intelligence.
The ability to develop empathy,
be able to fit in someone else's shoes.
Which of course started to take place after my father's death,
because after you have experienced this amount of pain
you can understand others better.
At the same time something else is happening.
This identification with the father figure
occurs in the captain's profession too.
Why? Because the captain has a mission.
He has a mission, to steer the boat safely,
the crew, the cargo, to their destination safely.
For a 13-year-old boy who's the only man in the family,
this comes to fill the whole picture,
so basically we are talking about someone,
who wanted to travel,
with a high sense of responsibility towards people and things.
About the compass.
The presence/absence of the father is significant.
Why?
Because I recall during one of the few memories I have,
when we went to Japan to meet him,
where we met, the first night we stayed in a hotel in Tokyo,
and I remember him telling me that he had wished me to become a lawyer, advocate.
Precisely he was saying a maritime lawyer as he was in the maritime world.
It seems like this grew inside of me
but when I finally had to choose my specialty -
as I joined the Law school in between -
this took place in 1973.
I belong, for better or for worse, as one sees it,
in the heart of the generation of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising.
My student ID is dated:
November 17th, 1973.
That was the day my student ID was issued.
Why would someone chose Law?
Someone may chose Law as a result of this connection with the father figure.
But all this is being processed
by this young man.
Why?
Because Law has within it the idea of Justice.
During that time there was Junta as well.
Junta represented everything in the opposite side of this notion,
no freedom, autocracy, arbitrariness,
so this is why I continued like that,
when I chose Constitutional Law as my speciality.
This selection of Constitutional Law
as a Master's degree led to other journeys.
Other journeys, other languages.
I lived in Paris for two years during my Master's degree,
but I was hired as a member of the scientific staff
in the Law school of Athens
by my dear teacher, Aristovoulos Manesis.
I left two years later for Madrid for a sabbatical
and later on, during the '90's, I went to Heidelberg.
Always for research.
Nevertheless, to the contrary
with the majority of my colleagues in the Law school,
I never practiced Law.
I never practiced Law because among other things,
I really wanted to commit myself to research but I also believed that Law -
and probably it's not fair for the Law profession, for sure it's not fair,
it was a very superficial opinion about Law -
that Law means that you are always forced
to defend something you don't believe in.
As luck would have it, at some point I chose
to do the opposite,
to be obliged to defend something that I believe in,
and that was a perfect match.
What do I mean?
When Nikiforos Diamadouros came to me
suggesting me to take over
as an assistant advocate at the Greek Ombudsman,
I accepted immediately.
I stayed in the Greek Ombudsman from '98 till 2003,
as an assistant advocate.
Afterwards, when Diamadouros was elected European Ombudsman I succeeded him,
I was elected by the parliament in 2003 and re-elected in 2008.
The Greek Ombudsman has always been
a very important and valuable institution.
First of all, it protects its independence.
Secondly, it has gained citizens' respect,
at least for its own functions,
and this is not something to forget in a country
where the public administration is unrepresented, dehumanised and chaotic.
Even in the mainframe of the work, the ombudsman,
interacts with the whole spectrum of the public administration,
its values advocated through tens of thousand cases so far,
they are elaborated values and strongly fundamental,
in the most critical sections.
Individual rights, environment's protection,
social rights, children's rights,
how we shall promote the principle of proper administration
within the administration,
fight against discrimination, fight for gender equality,
a huge section of action.
At some point I felt like I closed the circle in the Ombudsman,
after all these years.
In the summer of 2010,
when it was suggested to me to run as independent Mayor,
for the municipality of Athens, I accepted.
I accepted this proposal.
That was a new adventure.
Very tough as well and the proposal came suddenly.
It was sudden but I accepted because I liked it.
Why did I like it?
For decades now we see,
that cities are becoming World Gates.
This is the destiny of Athens as well, the question is how to manage it.
What do I mean? I see that globalisation has changed the relationship
between national states and cities.
National boarders are collapsing, fading.
What remains are the cities, cities' networks.
First the big cities and then the medium cities.
This is inevitable as shown by population movements.
At this point in Europe 70% of the population lives in cities.
By 2050 it will be 80.
In 2050 of the whole planet, 70% will be living in cities.
Cities are the workshops of the future.
Big challenges will be there.
In the cities, criminal rates are growing.
The cities are where crowds are coming in and the cultures are in conflict.
The most damaging environmental problems are in the cities.
In the cities there is also big social discrimination.
But great things are also happening in the cities.
First of all, young people are going to the cities.
Innovation and entrepreneurship are blooming in the cities.
Culture is blooming in the cities.
To the cities it is then.
When?
When I took over on January 2011,
I took over in a city where the first priority is to see
how we can keep the city standing.
First of all, the population must survive.
Many population layers had started to collapse
in a state of poverty, poorness.
In order for the Municipality to be able to respond
to all those duties and a lot of others responsibilities,
we had to cut back financially,
we had to unify legal positions inside the municipality.
Scale economy.
We had to introduce proper administration practices.
We had to learn to get up every morning,
go to work,
knowing that there was a possibility
we probably have to face a huge crisis as well.
Nowadays, we have to face the refugee crisis.
I was elected during the labor crisis.
The municipality was under siege for three months.
I recall, during the first months,
I used to wake up in the morning, realizing were I was,
and I said, "Oh, my God! I am the mayor of Athens. Ough!".
(Laughter)
It was horrifying but the moment you set your foot on the ground,
a new day had started.
The people, whatever we achieved during the first course,
with those circumstances,
with all the issues of proper management and administration,
the fact that we developed a huge social work,
and that we kept the city outgoing as much as we could,
praised them in 2014.
This is what I say to my colleagues, people praised us back then.
Not because we transformed the city.
It was impossible to make it happen under those circumstances anyway.
But we had already placed the foundations,
to make the city more open to the international reality.
The municipality is present in all city networks,
the European and the bigger international ones.
It has a big presence in Europe, in the network of C40,
in the network of Resilient Cities, the 100 Resilient Cities in the world.
It participates in the networks created by the Bloomberg institution,
the ex mayor of New York,
and has won with distinction in competitions.
The municipality knows that it must constantly
bring new sources and technical knowledge in the city.
European sources as well.
And the municipality must work hard, and it is working hard,
to create new jobs in the city.
It promotes entrepreneurship,
innovative entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship,
the municipality of Athens,
and it is doing that functioning as the motion power within the city.
It brings together the city's lively powers.
The private sector, the citizen's society,
the research centres, the universities.
Let me give you an example of what we are doing now.
There are schools in very bad condition.
City schools.
We are talking about around 400 buildings.
We came up with this plan,
where we found a sponsor, Coca - Cola 3E.
We contacted the Architectonic School of the Technical University of Crete,
there they develop some methods,
how educational procedure can be promoted with architectonic intervention.
This program will be evaluated when it's done
by the University of Chicago.
A very good example is how we should work in the city,
uniting forces.
(Applause)
Now...
I have been asked too often,
how do I feel about the change from the university to politics?
Obviously, the daily life does not have much in common.
Different challenges, different dillemas,
people are different, everything is different.
Nevertheless, the way of thinking, deep down, stays the same.
We all carry what we are,
and what we are has been formatted through time.
This is what I am trying to tell you, by mentioning my own life story.
I see the pattern change but the canvass stays the same.
What did I do?
I was a professor of Institutional Law and what I taught
was how we could defend that big social asset,
maintain the lawfulness.
Institutional lawfulness.
Not like an infertile stuffiness,
but like a constant application and placement of institutional laws,
principals and values.
That is what I tried to share in the Οmbudsman,
to impose it as much as I could in the public administration.
And that is what I am trying to apply today, as a mayor.
So we see that the journey goes on,
the compass stays the same,
and precisely,
when in a very crucial moment we had to prohibit the soup kitchen
at Syntagma Square for Greeks only organised by Golden Dawn,
that was the reaction.
Our reaction was that, not only was this repelling and repugnant,
it was against the institutional value of human principals.
There is another foundation under this.
It is not appropriate for a municipality to allow in its central square,
to push back some people,
and to serve food to others according to their identity card.
(Applause) That was it!
So... (Applause)
So, as we see, the journey continues,
it's actually the compass that always remains the same.
Thank you very much for your attention.
(Applause)