Layers of the old Piraeus station: connecting stories, place and data in Daring Cities

We can hardly hear each others’ voice as we head West in the Piraeus port. On our right, tall buildings loom over us, echoing the noise of the traffic on the left. Trapped between the infinite flow of cars and the towers overlooking the port, it feels as if we walked the tightrope in the surrealistically narrow strip of public space towards a couple of trees that forced their way through the concrete pavement. Behind the trees, the station building.

The architects accompanying our group open the gate and suddenly an oasis opens up before us. Behind the gates, a long wall and the station building, that has been abandoned for over a decade, a stretch of grass, weeds and trees spontaneously growing out of the contaminated soil in every possible direction cover the rails that no longer lead anywhere.

As our group traverses the field behind the station, slowly balancing our steps around the abandoned railway tracks, we all think about the future of this area. Public servants from Altea, Den Helder, Dunaújváros, Kragujevac, Olomouc and Ravenna all recognize the sense of freedom and indetermination that this terrain vague evokes. They simultaneously think of the railway stations turned into bars, recycling centres, community gardens and linear parks that we visited together in Paris and areas in their hometowns waiting for new uses and new stories.

Storytelling, Placemaking and Data: the main fields of knowledge explored by the URBACT Innovation Transfer Network Daring Cities partnership in the past year all come together in the Piraeus station. Daring Cities builds on Ravenna’s Urban Innovative Action-funded project DARE that mobilised choral storytelling and a horizontal data ecosystem for the regeneration of the city’s Darsena area. In the two years of Daring Cities, the cities Altea, Den Helder, Dunaújváros, Kragujevac, Olomouc and Piraeus worked on exploring the different components of the DARE project in order to use some of its methods and approaches in addressing their own urban challenges.

The former station, which once connected the Attica peninsula's railway network with the port of Piraeus, has witnessed history from close. It hosted refugees from Asia Minor, it served as a hiding place during the war, babies were born between its walls and a few people still live here in some of the abandoned sheds and train wagons scattered around the site. The first questions crossing our mind concern the contrasts of the past, present and future of the station. How to tell the story of this building and its surroundings? How to build on its multitude of stories when conceiving a new use for the station area?

One key component of DARE and Daring Cities is storytelling, conceived as far more than a simple communication exercise or a tool for public relations. In one of the meetings of the Daring Cities partnership, Ravenna consultant Saveria Teston defined storytelling as an "embedded device" integrated directly into transformative urban processes, serving as an active and continuous component of change. Within this framework, "choral storytelling" – or collaborative or multi-actor storytelling – acts as the bridge between technical urban planning and the collective imagination of the citizenry. By engaging multiple perspectives to define how a city’s future is narrated, the choral storytelling aims to move residents from being mere spectators to becoming active "protagonists" in the transformation of their own environments. In Daring Cities, choral storytelling is the engine that transforms urban planning from a technical, top-down exercise into a collaborative social journey.

The station is a blind spot at the edge of the Piraeus municipality: at a a few minutes walk from the economic centre of Piraeus, the station is located at an angle of the port area that receives almost no foot traffic. The railway tracks that run abandoned for another kilometer and a half towards the Northeast, separate Piraeus from its neighbouring municipality Drapetsona. How can this urban scar be healed, and this forgotten area be reconnected with the rest of the city?

Placemaking is another key approach of Daring Cities. “The concept of placemaking,” explained public space expert Vivian Doumpa, “is rooted in the fundamental distinction between a physical ‘space’ and a meaningful ‘place.’” In the Greek language, these are expressed as horos and topos, respectively, terms that carry distinct emotional weights. A space is defined by its physical characteristics—its benches, its waterfronts, or its hard surfaces—but it only becomes a place when people feel safe, comfortable, and vulnerable enough to express emotion and intimacy within it.

Placemaking emerged as a necessary reaction to the top-down, non-human scale urban planning that dominated the 20th century. Historically, planners often "copy-pasted" solutions from one city to another, such as attempting to replicate the Piazza del Campo of Siena in the windy, cold climate of Boston, which ultimately failed because it ignored the specific needs and contexts of the local community. Instead of imposing top-down prescriptions for space, contemporary placemaking aims at creating open systems that allow local talent and unexpected initiatives to emerge while fostering a strong sense of community ownership.

Tactical urbanism is one of the tools of placemaking: as people need to see immediate results to build trust in the process, tactical interventions – short-term actions tied to a long-term vision – allow for testing ideas in the "here and now" before committing to permanent solutions and consequently, multi-million-euro investments.

Ultimately, placemaking is not merely about "ticking a box" for participation; it is about systemic impact. By empowering different social groups, cities are building the active citizenship required for a healthy future democracy. These processes provide a platform to discuss complex issues like climate adaptation, social justice, and urban accessibility.

In order to prepare informed discussions and interventions, urban regeneration needs to be based on data. For a better connection with the neighbourhood and enhanced sustainability, we need to understand the station’s surroundings through its residents, the most frequent walking paths, missing services from the neighbourhood, its heat islands and cool spots.

The third pillar of Daring Cities is data. Ravenna’s approach to data is rooted in the belief that it is not just an administrative tool but an "enabling condition for strategic planning," provided the city can foster a culture of data literacy and systematic interpretation.

Ravenna’s strategy is built upon the realization that “project implementation must be followed by long-term continuity and education,” explained the Ravenna Municipality’s Giulia Cillani at our meeting in Piraeus. “The city has identified four specific objectives for its data ecosystem: improving citizen data education through direct engagement, enhancing data interpretation in collaboration with residents, spreading digital culture, and maintaining long-term data collection on the quality of life at the district level.”

The goal is to move beyond isolated projects and build a systemic "ecosystem" where data collection and interpretation are integrated into every planning activity and the institutional culture. This requires "systematizing" efforts across different municipal departments, ensuring that colleagues who work with data are not operating in silos but are part of a unified framework.

One of the most striking components of Ravenna’s data ecosystem is the use of digital art to make abstract data visceral and understandable for the public. Developed within the DARE project, the pneumOS project uses outdoor climate stations in the Darsena area to collect air quality data. This technical data is then translated via a code into a digital artwork described as an "alien" or a "lung”, that recreates a "breathing experience," where the breathing patterns of the digital entity change based on air quality levels. If the air is healthy, the alien’s breath is relaxed; if the quality is poor, the breath becomes gasping and anxious. To ensure accuracy, the artist engaged a medical team to recreate the exact breathing frequency a human would experience in stressed versus relaxed situations.

PneumOS serves as a powerful pedagogical tool. By transforming technical air quality measurements into sound and movement, the artwork allows citizens to "interpret the air quality of the city just by looking and experiencing" the installation. Even the municipality's environment department has embraced the tool, expressing a willingness to use the artwork for future awareness-raising activities.

Ravenna’s work to create a data ecosystem is a testament to the belief that the “city is breathing” through its data, as suggested by Giulia. By combining artistic expression, citizen science, digital infrastructure, and strategic municipal reform, Ravenna is attempting to build a city that is not only "smart" but also more transparent, equitable, and responsive to the needs of its inhabitants.

As we leave behind the station and walk back to our venue, we cross the harbour of Piraeus. As large ferries wait for embarking passengers, others are already off the coast, heading to far islands or other continents. A port is a complex logistical operation, serving as an economic engine for the city of Piraeus and the “backyard of Athens", the industrial west of Attica. But it is also a place of contemplation and imagination, filled with dreams of departing or arriving. No better place to demonstrate, I think as I walk past some passengers enjoying the last rays of sunshine on this late February afternoon, while others are nervously controlling time, how places are intertwined with stories and data.

Submitted by on 12/03/2026

Levente Polyak

I am an activist, urban planner, researcher and policy adviser. I studied architecture, urbanism and sociology in Budapest and Paris and I taught at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, the Budapest University of Technology and TU Wien. I was visiting fellow at Columbia University and the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Malaquais and hold a PhD in Sociology from the Central European University. I have worked on urban regeneration projects for the New York, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Budapest municipalities.

I am editor ofCooperative Cityco-founder ofEutropian Research & Action(Vienna-Rome), member of theKÉK - Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre(Budapest) and Board Member ofPlacemaking EuropWith these organisations, tapping into resources of Horizon, Interreg, JPI and DUT programmes, I have been working on connecting community-driven practices across Europe with each other, with local municipalities as well as EU-level policies and policymakers.

In the past decade, I have developed specialised expertise on urban regeneration, cultural development, community engagement, local economic development, ecosystem-building and social innovation, with a special focus on building development scenarios on existing resources. Building on this expertise, I have been supporting public administrations and NGOs of various sizes and geographic locations across Europe in creating spatial development projects and new governance models.

Based on these activities, I have worked as an expert in several URBACT networks (Temporary Use as a Tool for Urban Regeneration, Interactive Cities, ACTive NGOs, RiConnect, CO4CITIES) and Urban Innovative Actions projects (Curing the Limbo Athens, DARE Ravenna, CUP 4 Creativity Újbuda, Rock the Block Egaleo), designing learning trajectories and coordinating knowledge exchange projects between municipalities, knowledge institutions and civil society organisations in various countries of Europe.

In the past years, I have been researching new organisational and economic models of community-led urban development projects and methodologies of civic ecosystem-building, co-authoring the books Vacant City: Experiments in Inclusive Urban Regeneration (2015), Civil Város: Lakatlan ingatlanok a közösségek szolgálatában (2016), Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces (2017), Il rilancio dei mercati: spazio pubblico, servizi comunitari ed economia circolare (2019), The Power of Civic Ecosystems: How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient (2021) and Open Heritage. Community-Driven Adaptive Reuse in Europe (2023).

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