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Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes the urban development of Tirana through the lens of Cindi Katz' minor theory framework and Deleuzian thought on fascism. My main argument is that Tirana's urban landscape has constituted a grounds for both national and international political dynamics to disempower its citizens.

Paper long abstract:

Moving away from mainstream academic considerations on architectural developments in Tirana during the last two decades, which mainly emphasise the works of starchitects and their international studios as signs of the Albanian capital becoming more of a European one, I argue that urban development in Tirana is the result of a subtle everyday fascisms. From unconstitutionally appropriating public spaces to turn over to private developers collaborating with starchitects such as Bjarke Ingels to commissioning a paint job over the dictator's mausoleum, Tirana's fraught and bloody public space history is art-washed at the expense of its citizens.

The visual assemblage of architectural imagination that has dominated development discourse in Tirana, taking the form of architectural renderings presented during electoral campaigns often hide threats to cultural heritage. Contrastingly, I place emphasis on the political ecologies (Bennett, 2010) that are overlooked by the neoliberal architectural imagination. By focusing, instead, on "minor theory [...] as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge [and] produc[ing] renegade cartographies of change (Katz, 1996)", I denounce the fascist practices that have desensitized citizens to national politics.

Moreover, I take to consider the visual material that neoliberal development and the older parts of the city of Tirana produce as two contradistinguishing extremes when compared in terms of the affects they display. Lastly, I make the case for future transpositions of the urban porousness of the city via the decolonization of architecture practice.