The City That Was Transformed by Color
Ingrid Fetell Lee, who hosts a remarkable website called The Aesthetics of Joy, often features the transformative power of color in the lives of people.
You know, I never really thought of color as “transformative,” but I realized she had a point when she told the story of Edi Rama, the mayor of the post-Communist city of Tirana, Albania, from 2000-2011. (Rama is now the country’s Prime Minister.)
In her book, Joyful, Lee recounted how Rama, an artist himself, took a drab, depressed, falling-apart city and turned it around in an urban heartbeat simply by painting many of its buildings with murals and bright colors!
Case in point:
Did this wild idea work? Let the numbers be the judge:
In the first four years of his tenure, tax revenues increased six-fold, the number of new businesses increased four-fold, tourism increased significantly while crime decreased in equal proportion, and the local people began to have hope that the future would not be as bleak as their past had been.
Just by painting some buildings! (He also planted trees around the city to liven things up a bit.)
It’s really one of the most fascinating and unexpected success stories in the world. A native poet pointed out that “the colors didn’t change the city, the city changed around the colors.”
A lesson for us all.
It’s extremely difficult to find pictures of Communist-era buildings because the tiny country of Mother Teresa’s birth was totally controlled by the brutal Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, for forty-one long years.
However, this image of the pyramid-style tomb they buried the tyrant in is a tangible symbol of how completely awful the whole social-political situation was.
I had the dubious privilege of visiting Soviet Russia during the era when Communism was still a viable political system, and even then I wondered: How do people live like this?
Well, politics aside, Mayor Rama (who is a baptized but non-practicing Catholic) showed people that you don’t have to live that way.
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If you’d like to see more colorful buildings, you may find the pictures in this tour guide’s article fascinating:
https://www.blocal-travel.com/road-trip/tiranas-colorful-buildings-html/
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Photo Credits: Via Wikimedia Commons: Feature (Albinfo, CC BY-SA 3.0); Pyramid (JoraK, CC BY-SA 4.0); other images via Atlas Obscura.