Preserving Tirana
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71398/as.v19i19.488Abstract
The architecture and urban planning of a city are a reflection of its society, of the political changes and power shifts that society undergoes through time, a thesis that rings especially true in the case of Tirana. This is because Tirana’s urban structure has largely been shaped by an ongoing process of tabula rasa that continues even more intensively today and that consists in the devaluation of the past in order to replace it with “the new”, ostensibly “the contemporary”.2 This has led to a situation whereby a certain group of architectural works that are widely regarded to be the main surviving representatives of the “organic” development of Tirana, find themselves stuck in a limbo as it were, as well as being perceived as “undesirable buildings”. Even though these buildings embody a rich tapestry of historical, cultural, and architectural values, they have largely remained outside of the purview of architectural preservation efforts, which explains their current predicament.
In view of the institutional unwillingness to preserve these buildings even though they are so clearly and palpably at risk, it was decided that the best alternative strategy for preserving them consisted in reclaiming these buildings and the values they embody for the community by re-activating the community’s collective memory about them and therefore about the city itself, thus using these buildings as a way of re-appropriating the city itself. The instrument used to achieve this is an interactive platform of digital documentation, preservingtirana.city, where the database represents a combination of theoretical research with ethnographic interviews, fieldwork mapping, and photographic documentation. Preservingtirana.city is an interactive website and, at the same time, a public archiving platform that relies for its content on the use of open access knowledge, open source software, and Creative Commons licenses. Since the buildings documented on the website are a common good that belongs to the city and its inhabitants, it follows that the process of gathering information about them and the continual expansion of that information base is a common right and responsibility too. Consequently, this project of archiving the spatial traces of historical layering in Tirana has been conceived as an ongoing, participatory, and sustainable process.