Kamza and Tirana

A Travel Captured in Correspondence. The Planned, the Unplanned, and Everything in Between

Authors

  • Dorina Pllumbi Delft University of Technology
  • Willie Vogel Delft University of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.8-9.7262

Abstract

The text offers a glimpse into the conversation between two of the three organizers behind the training school titled ‘The Planned, the Unplanned, and Everything in Between’ held in Tirana and Kamza in March 2023. Three months before the training school, the two correspondents, Willie, visiting Albania for the first time through an STSM, and Dorina, temporarily located in the Netherlands, exchange daily thoughts aiming to interpret the two cities’ urban situations and sociopolitical conditions. Albania’s historical position at the edge of Europe has seen a remarkable shift in recent times, turning into an emerging discovery. Simultaneously, a burgeoning self-awareness of subverting narratives of representation has begun to take root among the Albanian youth – a phenomenon that adds depth and complexity to the ongoing dialogue. The transformation of the cities and the country is explained as multivocal while acknowledging protests, loss and destruction as part of a glorified urban project. 

Author Biographies

Dorina Pllumbi, Delft University of Technology

Dorina Pllumbi – WG2 – is an architect and a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Her research interest resides in studying practices of commoning as material and spatial engagement in realities of political transition. Her particular focus is to understand the role that commoning practices have played in Albania during the transitional period from a totalitarian state-socialist regime to a recently consolidating neoliberal one. Currently, Dorina is a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York City. 

Willie Vogel, Delft University of Technology

Willie Vogel – WG1, WG2 – graduated in 2020 from Delft University of Technology. In her final project she used narrative tools to research the feeling of being at home through scales. After graduating she moved to Berlin where she is finishing her double degree bachelors in Philosophy with a thesis on Ecophilosophy and New Materialism. She works parttime in a start-up with Sophie van Riel and Italo de Vroom to develop the graduation project further under the name Studio Makadam. She also works parttime in the start-up Studio Inscape, where she merges her philosophical interests with (architectural) design together with Eileen Stornebrink and Charlotte von Meijenfeldt. Finally, she is involved in the network as research assistant for the chair Methods of Analysis and Imagination at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of Delft University of Technology. 

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Published

2023-11-14

Issue

No. 8-9 (2023): Writing Urban Places: New Narratives for the European City

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Dorina Pllumbi, Willie Vogel

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.