Transhumances

The essay contributes to the OMB series (Observatory of the Mediterranean Basin) a “Joint Center of Excellence” of UNECE (United Nation Economic Commission for Europe) and POLIS University that focuses on issues of sustainability and resilience in the areas of housing, planning and urban development. The paper excavates archaic sociocultural stratifications in the multilayered landscape of the breathtaking coast of Southern Albania. By that, it summons possible alternatives to recent proposals for a regional valorization of the area from Vlora to Saranda, oriented toward goals of economic, although sustainable, development and framed in the transnational space planning of the Balkan coast. The cultural, ethnical and religious diversity of the surviving enclaves have been grounded by century-long territorialization processes engaging the Balkans, Greece, Corfu Island and Otranto across the strait. The landscape mosaic of tangible and intangible layers collapses into the seasonal settlements of transhumant pre-Ottoman shepherds: a pattern of pebble-stone wells shadowed by fig-tree woods along the shore. The text elaborates on the compatibility of geopolitical aspirations with the prerogatives of an architectural territorial vision and on the practical viability of combining principles from contradictory theoretical models of territorial development to deploy an effective plan.