Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama at the Conference “Promoting culture for a sustainable development”:

 

Welcome to Tirana! I hope you will have time to visit also Durres. I do not know if you have enough time to go even beyond Durres, because I believe that there is much to see.

I’m very proud to say that at this stage of the country’s rule, despite the extreme difficulties we have had and continue to have – because of a very serious legacy in terms of state finances, we have embarked into a program of financial discipline with the International Monetary Fund – we have increased the budget for culture.

Of course, the increase of the budget for culture is always relative because it is never enough. But I believe that, where possible, it is always beneficial to the development of the country’s society if you protect, save or restore an object of cultural heritage instead of building one kilometre in infrastructure.

It is important that we continue to find ways to deepen dialogue and cooperation with one another here in the region. There are many things that bind us, and there are many things that are common challenges, for which the experience of each of us can be enormously useful to avoid repeating the same mistakes, or to solve in a faster time, based on best practice, the similar problems that we face.

I keep always asking myself a question, which I believe can be raised not only in Albania but in every country of our region. How is it that our fathers, who supposedly had fewer chances to see the world, or to learn from the world, when they build their homes or their villages, they built them more beautifully than we do?

Just look at our common coastline and make a comparison between the old villages and the new developments, to view a painful and incomprehensive degradation of the taste, of the relation with beauty and the aggression of ugliness. I believe that our region has been living for many years under the aggression of ugliness, in terms of the relationship with beauty as heritage, and the relation with development as benefit.

This aggression of ugliness has depleted us in relation to the extraordinary cultural and natural heritage of all our countries. This dizzying race on the path of unsustainable development for short or even medium-term profits did not allow us not only to think deeply, but also to have a strategic approach to beauty as a source of sustainable economic development. It is very important to find ways to influence as much as possible government at central and local level in view of beauty.

I often face a vulgar criticism with regard to our program of Urban Renaissance, which is basically a program that aims to revive the relation with beauty in public spaces. According to this criticism “we don’t have food, and you invest in facades; we don’t have running water, and you invest in lighting; we have a thousand and one concerns, and you deal with museums and public spaces, and at the end of the day we don’t have either food, or running water, and we don’t find any solution to our problems.”.

Of course, it is a completely frivolous criticism.

It may seem pointless to waste time to explain “why”, but I bring this to your attention to highlight another aspect, a positive one, of all this approach which, if we could, we would strengthen with more investments and more funding. The positive aspect relates to the fact that there may be countries that are both beautiful and poor, but there is no country that is both ugly and wealthy. There may be beautiful countries where there are a thousand and one problems, but there is no country where the aggression of ugliness has brought prosperity, has  brought a sense of measure and a sense of the future for younger generations or the generations to come.

What we look translated in real numbers is that where our investments for beauty have been consistent, the growth of the local economy has also been consistent. The difference is immediately noticed where we have not managed yet to extend this program. Even though it could be about areas that are too close to each other, a new road may have connected these two areas, but it hasn’t produced the same signs of local development as in the area where it has been invested for beauty, or where the aggression of ugliness has not been challenged by any attempt to set another standard of the relation with the public space.

I want to conclude with one example of my experience as mayor, where I have seen and I could touch with concrete facts, how the physical renewal and a new relation with space, in terms of a sense of beauty, has had an immediate impact on the people’s approach to the law, to their obligations to pay contributions to the city hall, and to their approach to being willing to contribute all together in order to take forward a project of rehabilitation, remediation and physical renewal of the area.

If we take from a factory that produces elevators two elevators on the same day, and place one of them as it is, while we scribble on the other one and disfigure it, we’ll see that, although they are next to one another, the scribbled elevator will be out of use much faster than the other elevator, even though in mechanical terms they are exactly the same age.

This is a proved experiment that enters the long list of examples that I gathered back then to show face to the vulgar and frivolous criticism, how important beauty is in relation to our need to have a harmonious relationship among people in a community. But also a correct relationship with the laws that regulate the coexistence of a community, a positive relationship with a sense of sustainable development, which is apparently much more tedious and much more difficult, but which, if it has a constant pace, with a strategic vision and a practical sense of its implementation, its results will be more qualitative than aggressive, unstable, and haphazard development. Such development has actually dramatically disfigured our entire region, all the countries in our region, both current member countries of the European Union and those aiming to join the EU.

I consider it very important that the European Union has been increasingly having a positive approach to our insistent request to have in the focus of its projects not just the funding to build new prisons, build the new courts or new police stations, but also how to bring today closer to the people the beauty of the past, and how to connect them with what we are building today in order to give continuity to a story that has become discontinue, due to a barbarian inspiration that didn’t come from our ancestors, but was generated by us, their descendants.

No architect today is able to challenge the constructions made in the village of my grandparents. If you look at the village in the upper part, and then look at the construction in the lower part, on the road to the coastline, keep in mind that the barbarians are down there and the Europeans of today are those in the upper part. And those who were up there were one two centuries ago, while those who today inhabit the lower part, live together with us, among us.

Thank you!