Constructing landscape: Traces of modernist rural landscapes in Albania

During the 20th century, embedded in the spirit of the nation- and state-building logic, Albania underwent three profound social transformations (Bardhoshi, 2011) based on state-driven development and modernisation projects and articulated by specific ideological perspectives governments had on society, culture, and people and that materialised into its rural landscape and architecture. Through the introduction of chosen representative macro-areas as case studies, this preliminary contribution investigates Albania’ countryside as a modernist rural landscape example. In fact, since independence from the Ottoman Empire (1912), modernity seems to have been regarded in Albania chiefly as a state-based ideological project. The past communist regime’s nationalistic emphasis enclosed existing rural villages within state-controlled collective farms and agricultural cooperatives, while planning the “urbanization” of the countryside and the industrialization of the country as a declared and tangible project towards the modernization process of a new classless society (Rugg, 1994; Lelaj, 2015). Then, in the early 1990s, at the dawn of its collapse, the communist government started the de-collectivisation of the agricultural lands following the principle of land distribution, denying any prior inheritance rights; a process that during the first years of the post-socialist era took a drastic turn, basing itself on the opposite principle of land restitution (Bardhoshi, 2013). In this context, rural landscape and architecture underwent a further reshaping process that demonstrates all the difficulties involved in addressing and incorporating the memories, material culture and societal histories of the Socialist remains in the new democratic present (Lisjak, 2009; Myhrberg, 2011; Iacono and Këlliçi, 2016). Through the ongoing literature review and archival research processes, this contribution intends to generally illustrate the state-of-the-art and provide a wider overview on studies about socialist transformation in the Albanian countryside. The general purpose is not to cover all the contributions ever published on the topic, rather to combine different perspective and insights, initializing preliminary considerations while questioning further research developments and introducing the selected areas of study. Thus, stemming from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action EU funded project “Materializing Modernity – Socialist and Post-socialist Rural Legacy in Contemporary Albania”, this paper aims at introducing and setting a debate on the Albanian modernist rural landscapes’ legacy.