2019 - Tirana, Albania - Implemented

❻ - Shaping the city: cartography of an action
Tirana Design Week

As an outcome of the participation in the Creative Exchange in the Future Architecture Platform, we were invited to design and lead a workshop for the Tirana Design Week in 2019.

The course focused on a new way to understand and to study the city, exploring what is given and what is latent. The workshop mainly focused on the informal urban space of Tirana. The city has a collection of small informal (and residual) urban spaces that are not subject to regulations. ‘Freedom space, unruled space’ (Lynch, 1990. Wasting Away), related with the so-called smooth space defined by Deleuze and Guattari.

The workshop introduced a phenomenological research method to connect with the city through actions in the territory. This method helped us observe and analyze the city from a landscape perspective, encouraging a critical and proactive view. We aimed to define this layer of the city and discover how it connects with urban life and activity.

During the course, the students created a series of cartographies of the urban environment, using a variety of scales and focusing on different areas of interest. On the other hand, a set of analog photographs was produced using pinhole cameras, that they themselves created and developed.

Tirana - Ortofoto

Kevin Lynch: Wasting away. Photograph: Rajeev Bhatia

Tirana: Post- 1992 development

Students pinhole photographies