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Tirana has entered the world stage due in large part to the values and actions of its mayor, Edi Rama. A former artist, Rama has transformed the city through a variety of policies directed toward improving the common welfare through urban renewal and beautification. A firm believer in the power of the built environment to alter human perception and enrich lives, Rama brings to Tirana an artistic sense of optimistic activism and immediacy so often lost in the bureaucratic management of policy.
Honored with the award for “World Mayor” in 2004, Rama has gained international notoriety for himself and his city, opening Tirana to a much wider audience than previously possible. While tourism and investment remain relatively stable, the government’s assessment of the city’s future appears overwhelmingly confident, establishing international competitions for the design of major spaces in the public realm.
A unique brand of civic intervention, the policies all seem predicated on a model of minimum investment — high return. Unlike similar models in more financially healthy environments, the goal in this case is not necessarily achieving quantifiable capital improvements, but at least maintaining the appearance of having done so.
Manifested most famously by the “Edi Rama Colors”, (a civic beautification project whereby the mayor orchestrated a troop of local artists and painters to put a new face on the deteriorating communist-era apartment blocks), the programs reach well beyond the bottom line and deep into the psyche of the city’s inhabitants.
Historically (and especially in Tirana during communism), public architecture has served to illustrate and glorify the powers of the state. But here architecture is foregone, acquiescing to the power of image residing solely in the pictoral surface of building. A thin layer of paint transformed the city from an internalized chaos to a statement of assurance broadcast worldwide. This seemingly trivial act has enormous repercussions for the positioning of Tirana’s citizens relative to each other, and the positioning of Albania in relation to the world.
Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller
What is remarkable in the strategy of Mayor Rama and his associates is the intentional, and clever way it subverts a power dynamic once thought impenetrable. By leveraging publicity against resources, they capitalize on the power of negative, and even neutral attention to their gaping infrastructural and architectural deficit, which can now be seen as a commodity. As they expose the decrepit nature of the building stock, they generate publicity, dialogue, and the capacity to create wealth, in an economic environment once thought stagnant and irretrievable. By exposing their flaws instead of correcting them, they turn disadvantage into advantage.
This is not unlike strategies used by a team of guerilla artists operating in dilapidated neighborhoods of Detroit, “tagging” entire buildings in an eye-catching Day-Glo orange, bringing the derelict structures to the attention of city officials and rendering the status quo remarkable for the local residents who have capitulated their coexistence for so long. By promoting a higher level of visibility for the structures, this method and the Rama method promote a higher level of consciousness for the built environment in general, and a sense of complicit responsibility for its maintenance and development.
The Rama method also capitalizes on some potent characteristics of human psychology and social conditioning, by exposing and manipulating the human’s predilection towards establishing identity and difference. It is within the most assimilated environments that difference can make the most positive impact, and Rama, as an artist, has instinctively grasped this. The slightest asymmetry or disproportion is celebrated in a field of non-distinct substrates, and the overall impression of beauty is elevated for the environment as a whole, just as facial features and nuances of figuration that would otherwise go unnoticed are amplified and desired in men and women in uniform.
Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller
Disfigurement and imperfection can now be widely understood as exceptional forms of rare beauty, in an otherwise homogenized field of similarity. Thus the recent trends for “awkward”, or “gawky”, or otherwise assertively “real” models and supermodels storming the runways of the fashion world. By translating these aesthetic conceits into pragmatic action, Rama has transcended the role of the artist and the politician, and has assumed the role of image consultant for the city of Tirana.
By capitalizing on a societal predisposition to be intrigued by both the outlandish and the tragically misfortuned, Mayor Rama has been able to use the unfortunate circumstances of recent history as a background for his publicity machine. Without any real investment, besides the creativity of his staff and fellow artists, he has been able to turn Tirana’s misfortune into a profitable enterprise, not only for the bank accounts of Tirana’s citizens, but for their minds as well.
Imagine what such a strategy might yield for any number of disadvantaged people of the world. There is much evidence to support that similar appeals to humanity’s simultaneous impulses to be both fascinated by destruction, and willing to help, have been met with overwhelming response. Rescue workers trying to locate the coordinates of crashed aircraft and lost hikers have crowdsourced global scavenger hunts, banking on these very principles. With minimal investment, save innovations in photo software plug-ins, real-time networking, or file sharing, those agencies have been able to tap the power of otherwise disengaged individuals. Disaster areas and areas of humanitarian crisis have benefitted from the same sort of increased interest and accessibility, with applications like Google Earth’s user-generated mapping programs, where geographic data, news stories, message boards, and fund-raising are ingeniously interrelated to both benefit the victims, and keep the thrill of the novelty alive for those feeding an ingrained instinct to observe tragedy.
Rama’s unique brand of aesthetic urbanism not only benefits from astute observation of the personal human condition, but the interpersonal, or collective condition as well. It is clear that the projects intend a much larger effect than their immediate surroundings, hoping to start a contagion of urban renewal, and international media attention for the city of Tirana and the nation of Albania as a whole.
The project is successful by immediately providing the collective with a sense of accomplishment, a “beautified” environment that would translate into the moods of individuals, and their approval of their setting. This is proliferated through mimicry, whereby an individual’s state of mind is directly affected not only by his surroundings, but by his actions, demeanor, and the demeanor of those around him. As this concept is extended to include the built environment as an active “other”, in a series of intersubjective exchanges predicated on lighthearted expression and frivolity, it becomes clear that the change in “mood” for the city would be self-replicating from the simplest of interventions.
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Tirana, 2006. Photo © Copyright AGENCY / Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller
This article is excerpted from our illustrated research text entitled Nation Building Aesthetics, avaiable for purchase on Lulu.
