The Life and Death of Skanderbeg Square: A Chronicle of an Undoing Foretold, in a Hundred Years

Abstract:

This article chronicles the urban transformation of Skanderbeg Square— the center of Tirana, Albania’s capital city— over the last one hundred years. It traces a series of urban erasures in and around the square, which detached, estranged, and stole the square from the city. While there were many reasons behind these erasures, political and economic ones notwithstanding, there were also discursive choices that biased and sustained them, as there were others that could have been made against such erasures. The transformation of Skanderbeg Square was anticipated from the very beginning, in the projects of the so-called Time of Italy, between the two wars. The larger methodological stake of the article is precisely this anticipation, namely, the telling of a story through the critical and speculative lens of the future anterior: how and why does an event retroactively selects the reasons of its occurrence, and what other, potential transformations would have occurred at other junctures, if other choices were made. This is not mere fantasy or wishful thinking; it is only by showing that the past has always- already been many, and that it could have been different, that it is possible to imagine change in the present, and thus have agency toward the future.