Marginalized Spatialities

Abstract

This doctoral study explores forms of collectivities and their spatial politics in Albania across three political periods: state socialism, the anarchic aftermath of its collapse in the early 1990s, and the current neoliberal regime. It challenges the prevailing assumption that the fall of state socialism led to the loss of collective practices and a turn towards individualism. The study draws a sharp distinction between state collectivism, utilized by the party-state as the main ideological tool, and fragmented commoning practices that persisted and intensified precisely in moments of institutional failure and political instability.

Empirically, despite their fluctuating agency, it shows that commoning practices have remained present and politically relevant throughout successive regimes. Often overlooked and marginalized in professional and academic discourse, they have served as vital social infrastructures shaping the materialization of livelihood patterns and urbanization. Theoretically, the study advances the concept of kincommoning to account for collective practices reliant on practical kin-making, spatial proximity, reciprocity, and migration. It engages with these practices as contested terrains, recognizing the internal tensions and contradictions, while foregrounding their capacity to sustain collective life, as well as their often unseen defiant tacit politics of everyday life. Methodologically, the research has a transdisciplinary approach, integrating multi-modal spatial ethnography, including documentary film production, and reflexive writing.

Centering the agency of marginalized places as generative of knowledge rather than mere case studies, the dissertation critiques deterministic emancipatory frameworks perpetuated by the interplay of hierarchies of state power, market forces, and professional practices of architecture and urban planning.