Farmers with a View
“Farmers with a View” is the inaugural program of the Atelier Albania Summer Academy, supported by the National Territorial Planning Agency (AKPT) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (German Corporation for International Cooperation) (GIZ). The 2015 Summer Academy was organized by Adelina Greca and Simon Battisti, assisted by Ilva Gjuzi, and composed of a team of five students of architecture, urban planning, and urban design. Farmers with a View set out to investigate the status of tourism in four mountain villages in the Albanian Riviera—Pilur, Kudhës, Old Qeparo, and Old Himarë. And to figure out why these villages remain impervious to tourist income, while the towns along the beaches below overflow with it. Our goal: catalyze villages toward tourism with sensitive, impactful, low-cost ideas.
For three weeks, Summer Academy participants lived together in a small residence in the field, traveling between villages by car, with notepads, laptops, voice recorders, and curiosity. Our days consisted of hikes through the villages, picking figs and pears along the way, speaking with villagers under the shade of the old Plane trees, on their porches or in their living rooms. Most days ended with a swim in whatever town we found ourselves as the sun got low. We worked from our makeshift office on a terrace overlooking the Ionian Sea, and there we hosted visitors from Tirana with whom we discussed the stakes of our ideas. We shared a readings on tourism theory, urbanism, cultural studies, and anthropology.
The Atelier Albania Summer Academy carves out a space within architecture research in Albania that does not currently exist: it seeks to flatten hierarchies between student and teacher, and to treat inquiry as a practice of delight. With great purpose, the Summer Academy dispenses with the staid architecture research methodologies imposed by the for-profit university system in Albania, rejecting its insistence on scientific language—certain that the thinking that occurs through that language eradicates imagination and independence. In our method of working, the instructor is a facilitator; leading dialogue toward goals and schedule, and helping define intellectual and ethical criteria. But ideas belong to the group and are debated openly among equals. The mandate of the 2015 Summer Academy was to think and do through direct experience. Tourism is about pleasure, and to be able to access that concept in the most productive way, the Summer Academy insisted that a deliberate tone of playfulness in research ought to be considered a noble pedagogical aspiration.
The timing of the Summer Academy coincided with the busiest week of the summer season, exposing the stark contrast between the beach towns and the mountain villages. Where below an unbearable pressure for space and services erupts during the high season, the villages above remain intact; empty and waiting. Returning in the first week of September to discover an entire region almost unrecognizable from itself only two weeks before, it felt like we had the Bregdet to ourselves, there were no people to be found. We lived the elation and the disappointment that come with the wild swings in the tourism season, in physical space, and in real time. We think there is great promise for the people in these places to smartly and efficiently begin to bring money into their pockets, with little physical impact. The following pages elaborate our ideas for how we think these four towns could wisely approach their nascent tourism economies.