Sweeping generalisation: western Europeans find it hard to understand the Serbian mentality. So why not read the Subjective Atlas of Serbia and see how some of it maps out? You can order a copy of the book, should you be sufficiently impressed, which you probably should be. Congratulations to everybody who contributed to it, and let’s hope the next version isn’t as depressed about the carve-up.
A lot of Balkan music is shocking. Imagine if a country came bottom of the Eurovision Song Contest every single year for eternity, and you’re imagining the popular music scene you mainly hear in Montenegro – a choice between over-produced fake ballads sung by thugs or sledgehammer folk sung by pipecleaners. Clearly people love it, but then what do people know?
Luckily there are bright spots, and last week this corner of the Balkans has been illuminated by Darkwood Dub and Edo Maajka. Darkwood Dub have been around since the dawn of time – early promo photos featured them riding on dinosaurs1 – and are still going strong, with a solid fanbase many of whom were under 10 when the band started. It’s hard to describe their music – the “dub” part of it is mainly about the effects box they use on the vocals, with the occasional skanking rhythm in the background, and not really dub at all. They do feel quite 90s, but since they were ahead of their time, they’re in their own little musical universe in the Balkans. Here’s an average track with a nice video:
A different kettle of fish altogether: Edo Maajka, the region’s best-known rapper. There’s a lot of hip-hop around here; the clothing style is the same faux-American uniform as it is in most places, but the style is distinct. Serbian2 is a harsh language, perfect for battle raps, with consistent suffixes that make it easy to rhyme in. The one thing that Balkan rappers do have is something to rap about – war, sanctions, ethnic conflict, political shenanigens, and so on – although there’s always a worrying undercurrent of bling. Maajka has been around long enough that his rapping has a level of self-awareness that most don’t – he played out last night with his track Gansi, a trip down memory lane complete with Axl Rose impersonation:
New Kosova Report carries an opinion piece entitled God has stopped speaking Serbian. It’s a polemic against Serbs not learning Albanian, disguised as concern for the future of Serbs in Kosova. Thus,
If before Serbs did not really have to learn Albanian because Albanians could and had to speak their language, now learning Albanian is a must to function economically in Kosovo. Otherwise, there won’t be any future for Serbs here. While Serbian is an official language along with Albanian across Kosovo, this is barely essential if only 6% of the population is Serbian… The key for prosperity for all the minorities in Kosovo – Serbian, Roma, Turkish and Bosniak – is being able to function in the dominant language – in this case Albanian.
This is a fairly moderate view in Kosova, acknowledging at least that Serbs (and other minorities) have a place in the country – but even moderation has its limits in Kosovo.1 The basic limit of that moderation is that Kosova is Albanian, and anybody who wants a piece of that future – no matter how long their communities might have lived there – needs to buy into that.
Linguistic chauvinism was one of the factors that drove the conflict in Kosovo prior to 1999, and continues to be a hot topic in the region (particularly in countries with Albanian minorities), but the notion that Serbs must learn Albanian is of course bullshit. If Serbs are citizens of the new Kosova, and Serbian is one of the official languages of Kosova – both of which the article agrees with – then it’s up to the majority to make the necessary accommodations to the minority. Given how many Kosovar Albanians have lived (and continue to live) in Switzerland, I’m surprised that they haven’t noticed this rather basic requirement of a multilingual state.
Switzerland isn’t the best example – the Swiss-German continually chafe at the fact that they need to learn French to work in the government, while the Swiss-French seem to have little requirement to learn German. However they don’t use this as an excuse to force the Swiss-French to learn German, or to deny that they can be citizens if they don’t. This seems like common sense to me, but that’s not how we roll in the Balkans, unfortunately. And so the merry-go-round continues, with language used as a club to bash people with.
Depressing. If you want some more positive news about Albanian-Serb relation, then this report in Balkan Insight will warm the cockles of your heart. Serbs visiting Pristina? Astonishing:2
… of course I was reluctant to speak Serbian openly at first. But whenever someone overheard me speaking it in a café or restaurant, the only reaction was pleasant surprise and genuine joy. Most Albanians in those situations will squeeze out as many words of Serbian they know (be it a lot or just a little), smile, ask how are things in Belgrade, or even play some music commonly considered as “naša” (covering a wide array from Serbian turbo-folk over Bosnian sevdalinke to Croatian soft pop, but that’s an altogether different story). It seems they don’t think we eat little children for breakfast. Which is food for thought, if you can pardon the pun.
I never realised that Bruce Sterling had married Jasmina Tesanovic and lived in Belgrade for a few years. Well done Bruce. In this talk, he reflects on what Balkan society can tell “us”, by which he means of course the West. There’s a lot of good observations (if slightly obvious to anybody who’s spent any time in the Balkans) but towards the end he veers towards meaningless. Apparently the Balkans doesn’t have tragedy, but it does have fratricide – and here was me thinking that one of the cornerstones of (Greek) tragedy was slaughtering your own relatives. The division between “us” and “them” starts to look particularly odd when he starts talking about the Roma, who constitute a “them-them” – doubly alien because he sees them through the eyes of his Serbian peer group. It’s still worth watching, if only for his riff on the heroic nature of Yugoslav design.
UPDATE: Wow, that Vimeo embedding link really sucked. Fixed now!
On my voyage of epic proportions1 from Kotor to London by train, I passed through Basel and visited the Swiss Architecture Museum. Specifically to the Balkanology exhibition, which played to one of my interests (urban development), one of my locations (the Balkans) and one of my criteria (it was cheap).
The exhibition was divided into two parts. The first was a recital of modernist architecture in the former Yugoslavia, which proved surprisingly effective at making me take a second look at some buildings that I’d previously dismissed. The key problem for structures such as the National and University Library of Kosovo is that while on their own terms they’re quite interesting architecturally (although not necessarily charming aesthetically), when you put them in the middle of (for example) a large patch of waste ground next to a bombed-out orthodox church, they’ll always look terrible. While some of the buildings in the exhibition can probably be salvaged, most of them can’t – for reasons explored in the second part of the exhibition.
This was devoted to the problems of rapid urbanisation in the Balkans2, particularly the proliferation of improvised housing in a largely unregulated urban environment. Prestige projects such as the buildings displayed in the first section – buildings designed to inculcate a sense of national identity, or to communicate an ideological bearing – fail completely in such environments, overwhelmed by the vigour of their constantly mutating surroundings. In the Balkans, there’s a particular problem because the dominant communist style of solid concrete blocks looks pretty ridiculous next to an apartment block with three extra storeys built on to it, all of which are daily decked out with laundry, and suffering from a rash of satellite dishes.
It would be tempting to use an urban jungle metaphor here, with the generic building (say, the National Theatre) playing the role of a rare architectural orchid and the urban sprawl around it representing weeds that choke the life out of that precious flower. However this would play into a hegemonic interpretation of the city space, one that privileges the large public and private projects that the powerful prefer because they can control. This approach to urban planning is a guaranteed fail as soon as the spaces in which it is presented takes in more people than they were designed to manage. In those cases their purity can only be maintained by controlling access either through economic or physical barriers – a good example here would be Islamabad, contrasted with its unruly neighbour Rawalpindi.3
So that urban jungle metaphor is doomed from the start, and instead we should prefer a gardening metaphor. Those large buildings are the private estates of stately homes, designed to be contemplated rather than lived in, accessible to the public only upon the whim of the landowner, serving an aesthetic (or ideological) purpose more than a functional one. Meanwhile improvised housing is the kitchen garden – much smaller, built for productivity not beauty, serving the household or community much more effectively, accessible to anybody with a few square inches of land. If that latter metaphor is right, however, it presents a problem on two levels.
The first is that cities need public space, and that means those private estates need to be protected somehow. How we maintain public space against the weight of numbers is going to be a huge problem in the twenty-first century – I shudder when I think of Tbilisi, a relatively pleasant city where the government is determined to privatize everything (including the traffic islands). Public space includes infrastructure, of course, the roads and pipes and wires that make the city work. Is it possible to preserve the public space without attacking the kitchen gardens – without starting to treat them as weeds?
This leads to the second problem, that of regulation. Some form of urban planning is necessary for any city that doesn’t want to collapse under its own weight, but without sufficient regulation in place urban planning runs the risk of becoming meaningless. Too much regulation leads to static cities – but a city is a living organism and, if it doesn’t grow, then it dies. If I was feeling foolish, I’d predict that in the twenty-first century, we’re going to see the trends of urban growth morph into urban necrosis, particularly in developing countries, as whole sections of city simply collapse – either into massive slums or static citadels.
Too little regulation, of course, leads to Balkanology.
Well this is interesting:
Kosovo and Albania said they will soon sign an agreement creating a ‘mini-Schengen’ zone allowing free movement across their borders, a deal that could lead to a wider no-border zone in the region…
With signature planned withing two months, the two leaders said the agreement would be then sent to other states in the Balkans as an example of trade liberalisation and integration on the way to the European Union.
“This mini- Schengen of South East Europe would be followed by Montenegro and Macedonia,” Sejdiu said.
Of course, the first comments to go up on this news follows the well-worn paths of Balkan paranoia – specifically, the spectre of Greater Albania. It’s true that the countries mentioned in the scheme are those with Albanian populations, and that this scheme is likely to benefit those populations more than anybody else.1 It’s also true that the obvious next step would be – as this article points out – “a unified economic and external policy between the four, following the model of the Benelux countries.” Greater Albania, here we come!
Except of course, we don’t. Freedom of movement doesn’t create a Greater Albania, and neither does an economic area2 – unless you think that Albanians will outperform everybody else economically in that area3 but it does offer a way of stimulating economic activity across the region, which I would have thought would be something to welcome in these recessionary times. The only problem here would probably be Kosovo, whose economy is unlikely to take off any time soon and might drag the others down with it.
So why stop with those four countries? Invite everybody to the party! We could call it Not-Yugoslavia.
Tirana massively improved since I was last here seven years ago; the standard narrative places responsibility for this firmly at the feet of progressive mayor Edi Rama. There’s no doubt that Rama has had an enormous and generally positive impact on the city, but that narrative fails to take into account the role that the citizens of a city play in making and remaking that city. For a few days, that included me.1
The city is an act of consensus. It’s a negotiation from which it is difficult to remove yourself, except by physically leaving. Those who remain are the raw material from which the city is built; the construction of the city reflects those people and shouldn’t be mistaken for the city itself. TIrana feels like it’s on the move, and that’s not the result of painting a few buildings in bright colours.
So the new TIrana reflects a new generation of Albanians, that much is clear.2 Nowhere clearer than in Blloku (the Block), an area populated almost entirely by young people, especially at night. Decent bars with free wi-fi, upmarket shops with well-dressed assistants, pavements that aren’t punctuated by neck-breaking holes. From the Sky Club Cafe you can watch it all passing as the tower rotates – but then you can’t help but notice the rest of the city.
Tirana rolls three ways. The old communist-era apartments are still standing, the worse for wear and perpetually in need of repair. The new capitalist-era construction is going up, glossy and magazine-friendly, but limited to a few key areas. Meanwhile the future of the city is being written on the periphery – urban sprawl, particularly in the direction of the airport, is where most newcomers to the city end up. Illegal and improvised housing is the future of urban development – hacking the city.
You’ll find people who argue that setting up community wi-fi, mixing virtual and physical spaces, and even graffitti are all examples of hacking the city. They’re not. Hacking means getting into the guts of a thing and gripping it, shaping it to suit your purpose, not skateboarding in a car park. The people who hack the city are the ones building extra floors on their apartment building, extending blocks into grey areas, stealing electricity from the grid, throwing up kiosks on street corners.
The cities of the Balkans occupy an odd space between the first and third world,3 and their future is probably the best we can hope for in our future. First world cities won’t be able to sustain their infrastructure, tending towards decay; third world cities won’t manage to construct the infrastructure that defines the industrial west, and so they won’t feel that decay, but they will suffer the indignity of being perpetually hacked by their inhabitants.
It’s a mistake to look at cities as machines that can be fixed – they’re an act of consensus, remember? The only way the city will survive is if the planners and the hackers keep negotiations open and open-ended, continually plastering and patching and reinventing. Hacking the city is the only real option we have and, to that end it’s those communist-era apartments that show the way, not the shiny new luxury apartments,
