The City as a Contested Place of Desire

by | Feb 4, 2015 | Uncategorized

Many thanks to Jonathan Eaton, with Cultural Heritage Without Borders in Albania, and Simon Battisti, Fulbright Scholar and architect currently working in Albania, for being kind enough to provide guest lectures via video conference with my Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture class January 2015. In that discussion, I was particularly interested in having students think through how the city as a space is a site of contested desire, and how we read the stories cities have to tell. In many ways, our video conference continues a conversation about memory and identity that Jon and I have been having since our Fulbright year in Albania 2009 – 2010.  As an architect working in Albania and imagining futures, Simon has recently entered this conversation – a conversation into which I would like to invite you. I’ll let Jon and Simon tell you more about their interests, but as a concrete way of continuing our conversation, let me share a few images from a trip to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey to visit my friends Seher, Yucel, and Bora.  Obviously, as Jon is a cultural anthropologist, I made him come with me.  Among the amazing places we visited was Side – http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20110526-an-epic-ancient-ruins-road-trip. That’s Jon at the Temple of Apollo, which is literally sitting on the Mediterranean Sea.  To the right is the arch to the city, which has been settled since the 6th century B.C.  Note the taxis driving under the arch . . . I use these images to open up several questions for us: How do we tell the story of “civilization,” and how does this story set up a story of “civilized” and “uncivilized”  . ....