This article discusses the collaborative processes behind the redevelopment of the Dutch state heritage ship wharf NDSM in Amsterdam as a case of urban commoning that took place around the year 2000 – before the term became commonly used in urban studies. It explores how the former shipwharf was transformed into an “incubator”: a creative hub with artist studios, theater spaces, a skate park and other facilities for cultural production. In this article, we specifically investigate the role of architects in this context. Unfolding the process reveals the emergence of the figure of the participant-architect who participates in the shared authorship, within a collective situated knowledge. This knowledge is simultaneously produced in the place and productive of the place.@en

Architectural researcher Dorina Pllumbi explores the appropriation of an ex-industrial area of Albania for dwelling purposes. She points out the need for the architectural discipline to learn from the unconventional process of transformation of these realities by their new inhabitants.@en

This chapter discusses the struggles of commoning as a material engagement in Tirana, the capital of Albania, as it transitions from a totalitarian state socialist regime to a currently consolidating neoliberal one. It reflects upon the field of relations generated during the collective resistance to save the National Theater, which was brutally demolished in May 2020. The story of the theater is essential in understanding the ongoing suffocation of collective emancipatory initiatives generated spontaneously in times of developmentalist pressure of a corrupt state-power-capital coalition which does not confine itself even to the material cultural heritage. The commoning process of the resistance challenges power relations while generating new extra-institutional practices of care for the spatial and material conditions of the space and the human bodies affectively related to it. It contributes to a new understanding of collectivity in Albanian society, an indispensable feature to achieve democracy. The theater building plays an active role in generating collective practices, carrying a political and emotional load, that affect perpetual bonding relations. The affective capacity of the material-human formation challenges the current material culture of demolition and construction in Tirana and the language around it. New architectural practices of resistance emerge as new ways of engaging in collective endeavors in city-making.@en

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. @en

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.@en

Shëmti and feísmo are the two names given respectively in the Albanian and Galician languages to stigmatize this unruly built environment: It is considered a material expression of both constructed and internalized myth of being the underdeveloped peoples in the European periphery. This paper aims to explore how this stigmatization has been constructed and materialized in the built environment and the political and professional discourse. The paper presents a situational but also comparative analysis of Albanian and Galician realities, drawing similarities and different local perspectives present in academia, media, politics and architectural circles. This multi-layered and hybrid observation seeks to further explore the relational, ethnographic narratives of resistance, that subvert the myth of what is commonly understood as ugliness. Did the media or the political rhetoric of beautification had an impact over the years? Did the depreciation or demolition of heritage play a role in the production of identitarian stigmas? Are self-building practices at the root of this understanding of ugliness? We aim to see these architectural expressions differently, as playing a paradigmatic role in disrupting the hygienist industrialized models of European cities which are extensively promoted as the only way of designing the built environment. @en

Adopted as a playscape, Tirana’s Pyramid should not be cleansed of its multi-layered, complex memories@en

Blogpost in online magazine Peizazhe të Fjalës, 16-05-2020.@en