Space and Ethos; Fostering Supranational Citizenship in Urban Bioethics

The article examines the inextricable conceptual connection of space and ethos with culture and citizenship. It claims that the city is a prominent space for deploying citizens’ codes of conduct, taking into account the particularities of all groups. It also suggests ways of academic activities, like the introduction of bioethical principles in schooling of the young parts of the population, in the education of a new generation of building industry professionals, and the underline of the role of bioethics in understanding the interactions between the built environment and health, human well-being, productivity, energy use and environmental crisis. The article contains urban space snapshots in order to illustrate the phenomena and it also refers to Thessaloniki, a Northern Greece city, mentioning the conduct of inhabitants or, works of the authorities, who viciously offend city’s memory traces and culture. Finally, it suggests a list of ten points to develop our understanding why Space and Ethos are inextricably and culturally bound as a basic bi-pole of Urban Bioethics and thus promote supranational standards of European citizenship. These ten points are certainly relevant and useful to the discussion of the topic, but vary in depth and domain.


Introduction
My claim in this argumentation is that urban space and ethos are inextricably interwoven, fostering citizenship, i.e. the qualities of being a citizen within politically democratic conditions; after all, the city, or more concretely, public urban space, is a prerequisite for democracy, although its presence alone is not enough. Just like the chorus in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, I also respond to Sicinius's rhetorical question, "What is the city if not the people?" that "The people are the city, the people make the city indeed". 1 Surely, only the people may ensure the public-ness of our public spaces and, of course, the endurance, the resilience, and the vitality of our democracy. 2 In this case, we perceive urban bioethics by examining the entire city as an integrated body, including parameters of wellbeing and health, thus reaching beyond traditional healthcare and hygiene-cleanliness issues within the urban space. We examine the city's various grids by embracing categories such as social control and citizens' safety, traffic and energy networks, public spaces access, architectural and urban design, cultural and memory traces within the built environment (relics, museums, walls, archaeological sites, etc.) and city landscapes, etc. From all these parameters we will focus on public space, and cultural and memory traces, since we consider these as more relative to the citizenship qualities and that the urban culture is obviously being crystallized to public spaces.

The urban culture is being crystallized in public spaces and in bioethics
Ethics and space consist of the core of our urban culture; ethos condenses space and ethics, under a dual perspective, etymological and cultural. We set off from the Sanskrit origin of ethos [s(w)e-svah, svádhā, habit, custom] providing the basis for our reasoning; since space is unavoidably related to ethics (=ethos < Gr. ήθος, έθος), ethos is the morality crystallized as a specific value code in various environments, like the city (urban ethics) etc. Urban culture depicts the morality and the fundamentals of urban ethics and the entire modern civilization, since most of the global population lives in an urban environment made by us humans and our common destiny concerns us all and burdens us with the utter responsibility to preserve it. The framework of this responsibility is not theoretical but includes a broad list of topics and practices, like issues related to fauna (animals) and flora (plants), human health standards, and citizenship.
In any case, in this paper, we also take into account the kind of urban space that is bioethically viable not only in terms of built and hardware construction, but also the software services that the hardware provides, and offers the fundamentals for a viable urban bioethics based on the concepts defined by Fritz Jahr  In 1970, the American biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter (1911 also used the term to describe the relationship between the biosphere and a growing human population. Potter's work laid the foundation for global ethics, 6 a discipline centered around the link between biology, ecology, medicine, and human values. 7 Potter thought of the word while thinking about the foundation of an institute focused around the application of moral philosophy to concrete medical dilemmas. 8 We claim that the city is a prominent space for deploying citizens' codes of conduct, taking into account the particularities of all groups, in order to render an urban environment worth living in for all city dwellers investigating the way humans will live in smart cities surrounded by artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology and the Internet of Things (IoT). 9 Given these, the city is a prominent space for deploying codes of citizens' conduct, taking into account the particularities of all groups (e.g., third age or children) in order to render an urban environment worth of living to all city dwellers. This framework gives standing to the branch of "urban bioethics". Urban bioethics successfully enlarges the scope of bioethics in order to encompass questions about the sustained interaction of individuals with groups, communities, and of course, family and society. Urban bioethics should also take into account multicultural and intercultural issues, for example, in education or the socio-spatial sphere, 10 equity matters, and the conflict between individual rights and the public good. Encouraging a multicultural ethical discernment, fostering an appreciation of the political, economic, sociological, and psychological issues that inform the question of urban moral choice, urban bioethics is essentially a multi-disciplinary, synthesizing enterprise. Several theoretical models, including social contract, rule utilitarian, communitarian, and feminist paradigms, offer complementary conceptual frameworks. This paper is offered as a proposal, a road map for future study to place current bioethical analysis into a broader context. 11 The major responsible agent or factor of urban bioethical values is the state, the legal framework under which local administration also functions. What is important to this correlation is the urban and architectural design. In modern Greece and in urban spaces mostly, I have noticed a social attitude, which depicts the difficulty of distinguishing the private from public space; I have named this phenomenon "priblic" (from private and public) 12 a difficulty extended to political issues since there is an established convergence to disobedience and illegal behavior. 13 Pict.1. The picture is taken in Thessaloniki across the church of Aghia Sophia where the public pavement space for pedestrian use is also covered by parked motorbikes © K. Theologou Of course, this behavior and conduct is not a privilege of Greeks or Southern Balkan citizens but is abundant among "Western Europeans" like British, Italians, Spaniards, French, Belgians, E.U. officials, etc. 14 I could reluctantly expose our collective indifference and institutional negligence in many cases since the examples I have documented from all over Greece are numerous and infinite, so I should indicatively demonstrate some more pictures taken by my post-graduate students (School of Architecture) during an urban stroll. 15 The quasi novel field of urban bioethics is an epistemological and philosophical challenge, entailing issues of democratization, social separation and inclusion, discrimination, and egalitarianism. The novel human being-conscientious of the urban bioethicsimposes a moral code to all citizens, containing notably the virtue of syn-choresis, 16 [Gr. synchōrēsis-syn + χώρος/chōros = space] the virtue of sharing space with stronger and weaker entities, under the conceptual toolkit of Applied Ethics. Therefore, let us keep a second key-word from this applied contemplation of ours: syn-choresis, the act of spatial (=choretic, χωρική) co-existence, of giving space to another being, of sharing the commons, the essence of forgiveness. 17 The collective indifference of the inhabitants is due to a kind of a rather twisted perception and appropriation of modernity in modern Greece, because of a variety of reasons. 18 Pict. 4-5-6. Images from the historical centre of Athens (2017). Pavements, trash, graffiti etc. © K. Theologou

The Thessaloniki Experience
16 Take notice that this meaning of synchoresis is not related to the rhetoric meaning found in English vocabularies, e.g. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/synchoresis (accessed: 21 December 2019) 17 In Greek, syn-choro (συγχωρώ) means "I forgive", but literally it means "I fit in" or "accommodate myself together with another person".  (1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974), the dictators decided to build new courts of justice in Salonica, completely designing it along the Byzantine city wall (see Pict. [8][9][10][11], thus suffocating the memory traces and providing an ethical counter-example to all the residents and visitors. For example, the court of Justice building "embraces" the fortified Byzantine wall and the gate Top Hanès (16 th century), perhaps designed by Sedefkar Mehmed Agha, a famous Ottoman architect (see f.n. 20).
Pict.7-8-9-10. The surrounding area is given to a private parking business, which burdens the site, even more by underestimating the importance of historical and archeological sites and memories as a component of the collective identity. 20 The metro works in Thessaloniki also offer an "illustrious" example of how the authorities treat their citizens; this is one of the several working sites in the city's main traffic artery (Egnatia Street). The works have been hampering and impeding people's everyday lives for fourteen years, since June 2006. The original plan of the metro works had been scheduled to be completed in 2012. Respecting the governing institutions is also a matter of trust, and if governance promises are not kept, this trust is lost, and citizens also get used not to be trustworthy in an untrustworthy state. The Central Archaeological Council (ΚΑΣ) decided on the 18 th December 2019 that the Roman antiquities found during the metro excavation works will be removed; the antiquities of the Venizelos Metro Station in Thessaloniki came into the international spotlight again due to the recently suggested revision of the initial plan to preserve the antiquities in their original context. The recent decision foresees a new plan of removing the antiquities from their original setting, invoking financial criteria and arguments related to the further delays of the metro development project in case the initial plan of the "in situ" preservation of the antiquities is implemented. 21

The citizens
Public space in Greece had always been suffering from this elusiveness. The phenomenon is due to a variety of causes. One of these is related to the ongoing process of national integration -a longstanding process from 1828 to 1947; another reason could be imputed to the political choice of not accomplishing the cartographic surveying of the public space and property registration of lands and forests through cadasters. All have led to the absence of social consciousness and citizenship qualities.
This elusiveness developed an ambiguity between state, public, communal, and private; consequently, disrespecting the law followed as a natural effect. Disrespect for the limits of spatiality entrained disrespect towards the law, a wider attitude of disobedience, and a sense of temporary state and impermanence, and disruption. Citizenship and representation of public space are usually directly connected to the visibility and our natural presence in spaces of public access. So, space is not really public if it excludes someone or some groups; this effect often offends teenagers, adolescents, and children. The exclusion of the population is a very important indicator of the institutional function of democracy. People with disabilities, third age people, children, and other vulnerable social groups should not be excluded; technology may catalytically contribute to this inclusive design solutions. I will merely underline the role of street art and graffiti in order to differentiate it from pure vandalism. I have studied public space from a historical and sociological perspective in order to correlate graffiti and public art with the urban space in which many forms of artistic expression and sociopolitical activism are being developed. However, vandalisms, such as engraving ancient marble sculptures or Ancient Greek or Roman temples, or writing with a marker, for example, on the handrails of Ponte Vecchio in Florence, or on any cultural monument are not part of the equality we put forward for all public space users. But even in my hometown, Thessaloniki, the Byzantine walls suffer from everyday vandalism by teenagers' graffiti tags, etc. destroying the historical sites and demonstrating a notorious lack of citizenship qualities.
The size and number of our public spaces, their distribution across a city or town, and our ability to exercise our rights in them must be the measures for judging how public our spaces actually are. Public space may be the prerequisite for democracy, but access to it is not of crucial importance for everyone. Only the people can ensure the public-ness of our public spaces and the vitality of our democracy, but the prerequisite of democracy is social consciousness and self-awareness, and the latter are tasks for applied philosophers, for interdisciplinary professionals, we could name as Place-makers. We are in need of raising self-awareness among citizens from a very young age in order to reflect and think closely about the value and function of public space.
To me, it is clear that public urban space is the prerequisite for democracy. 22 In any case, public space, in reality, is not where the public sector ordains it, but where the public (the people) demands it. Public space, in brief, is a virtual value generator for its users and the inhabitants of a city. Truly and genuinely designing urban spaces is far from merely creating or redesigning the public places we want to go to, spend our time, or meet other people. It is about creating sociality among users, consciousness and citizenship values, so that individuals who meet in these public spaces have a profound capacity to self-organize their communities, express emotions, demonstrate solidarity, play chess or backgammon, exchange and incubate new ideas, even to bathe in a fountain. When communities come together to shape their public spaces, these commons can be a platform for democratic life of all kinds. 23 This democratic life is not generated automatically; schools, families, and the media should work together towards creating a common mechanism that could generate a citizen inspired by urban ethics and influenced by urban ethics values; the public urban space may be a key concept for delving deeper into democracy itself.

Epilogue
In this paper, we attempted to merely point out some of the crucial parameters of the continuous interplay between urban space and ethos, between urban culture and citizenship; more specifically, we claim that citizenship values of informed citizens and city inhabitants could develop tolerance and supranational values, thus fostering an urban syn-choresis and a civilized mode of life. Here is a list of ten points in order to develop urban syn-choresis and a civilized mode of life and our understanding of why Space and Ethos are inextricably and culturally bound as a basic bi-pole of Urban Bioethics.
It may appear that this list of ten points has not been argued from the preceding sections of my narrative and, it may seem as if the preceding argumentation does not lead to these ten points. Therefore, I will frame, rather I will either interconnect, each point of my list with a major concept discussed and presented above, or explain how I perceive this interconnection.
1. Travel abroad and to domestic urban regions; also take pictures of ethically or aesthetically bad and ugly things. An ugly frame depicts the relation between space and ethos; an urban space being ill-treated or even vandalized (e.g., a monument or a work of art in a public space, see Pict. 4-5-6 in this paper) is an eloquent testimony of my claim.
2. Develop criteria for educating social consciousness in schools. These criteria should be developed, taking into account my figures 3-4-5, as shown above. It is easy to rationalize these criteria within supranational milieux.
3. Design special courses of receiving and understanding urban space even in elementary schools. School courses are always related to the qualities of citizenship that the education system seeks to establish in its society. Above, we have underlined the importance of citizenship qualities and values, generating tolerance, and further urban syn-choresis.
4. Advise parents to take their children to museums and archeological sites. When the qualities of citizenship are put forward, they should always entail history and art; sites of historical interest can be found in all European countries, and museums offer a fine opportunity for enhancing this goal in a friendly and inexpensive manner by offering parents quality time to interact with their children.
5. Take children to public parks and sea beaches for picnics and entertainment, and then leave the spaces the same as they looked before arrival. This activity is certainly a suggestion for further enhancement of parents' and children's quality time and a call for fostering ecological consciousness as a prerequisite of s supranational citizenship; urban space bioethics and eco-consciousness are inextricably interwoven with their value-parameters. 6. Get accustomed to the idea of co-existence, of urban co-habitation, within these ongoing processes of globalization. The co-existence of citizens in a shared urban space in globalized conditions requires not only the development or cultivation of their supranational qualities as an idea but also as a well-established situation to which one has to be accustomed.
7. Design video games with urban ethics values. This can be part of educational methods incorporated within school courses and school recreation practices.
8. Print books for very young children with simple urban ethics' values. The point is addressed to authors and education professionals who could enrich our narrative apparatus and ways of teaching these values.
9. Spread urban ethics values through urban activism. This specific point develops the ideas and values cultivated in the previous points not only in theory but also in taking action of each and every individual citizen within urban spaces, in collaborating and working in groups so that they develop collective consciousness in serving these values in everyday practice.
10. Try to develop tolerance towards the Other; after all, immigrants and refugees are becoming an urban cultural constant for all European cities and societies.
The major point of all is to develop these qualities fostered above and use them as a generator of novel collective schemes of living within tolerance and syn-choresis (see figure 4 above), i.e. by accepting differences and particularities of the new societal formations already being shaped through the 21 st century.
Ethics and history are not 'nonsense'; ethics and history are about the sequence of events that led to the lives we lead today, the core of contemporary bioethics. It is the narrative of how we came to be ourselves. Understanding and giving space (syn-choresis) is the key to finding out how we can further change the urban world in which we live. Let us gradually foster a European socio-spatial synchoretic urban culture; this seems to be the challenge of 21 st -century urban bioethics.