The search for a weak legacy. Drawing as a tool to reorient readings of urban space in Tirana

This contribution aims to explore the potential of drawing both as a tool for critical urban analysis and as a basis for transformative scenarios, through some visualisations extrapolated from a research in progress. The work presented is part of an ongoing transnational project (called See:4 Cities) focused on the architectural socialist legacy in the Western Balkans (specifically in: Belgrade, Podgorica, Skopje, Tirane), aiming to rethink it as a partial countermeasure to the real estate speculative drifts that are affecting, albeit in a particular way, the aforementioned cities. Within this framework, a portion of the city of Tirana become here the subject of an in-depth visual analysis based on the construction of a specific syntax: conventional modes of representation are combined to interrelate heterogeneous factors – such as land configuration, tenure regimes, proper and improper uses of the space, social and building density and architectural distribution – thus bringing out material and immaterial elements of the space. Instead of a mere spatialisation of pre-tagged data, such approach primarily aim to reorient questions on particular urban areas and on their transformability. The output, in this sense, is conceived neither as a genealogical mapping nor as a basis for design in the strict sense. Rather, the scope is to identifying relationships which can only be grasped if visualised and thus defining a support for new urban reasoning. As a working method, the meaning of the proposed visualisations is never absolute or definitive: they are incremental, and will evolve further by integrating multiple dimensions depending on the different lens one chooses to adopt. The work deliberately straddles the line between automation and analogic, in the belief that the inquiry phase cannot be delegated in its entirety to a specific software or product, especially if drawing is considered in an epistemological sense.