Farmers with a View / Fermerë me pamje nga deti

Preface
“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
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