ARBERIAONLINE

January 27, 2010
by Elizabeth Gehrman, Harvard Gazette

Harvard Kennedy School hosted two iconoclastic mayors on Monday (Jan. 25), both of whom entered government in their countries as a second career and changed their cities by shaking up politics as usual.

The discussion involved the visionary urban landscapes of Edi Rama, a former artist and mayor of Tirana, Albania, and Antanas Mockus, once an academic and a former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. Addressing an overflow audience, the former mayors outlined the offbeat methods by which they helped to transform their cities, in a discussion titled “Dialogue in Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Transformation.”

“We see ourselves as moral subjects, but others as legal subjects. We obey for positive reasons, but we think others obey for negative reasons,” Mockus said.

As mayor from 2001 to 2003, Mockus used humor, peer pressure, and visual reinforcements as tools of cultural persuasion in Bogotá, a period in which the homicide rate fell by 70 percent, traffic fatalities dropped by half, water conservation increased, and drinking water and sewer service reached nearly all homes for the first time in the city’s history. He prompted 60,000 people to pay an extra 10 percent in taxes — voluntarily.

How did he help to foster those changes? By handing out thousands of thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards to citizens who used them as a peaceful way to judge one another’s behaviors in the public sphere, by hiring mimes to make fun of traffic violators, and by placing yellow stars at all the locations in which there had been a pedestrian death in the previous five years, just to name a few. The approach worked, he said, because it combined three regulatory systems: law, morality, and culture.

Rama’s approach was quite different, but proved equally effective. As a former artist, he started with paint when he was elected in 2000 “with a landslide but no budget” to head the capital city of Albania, a country with a troubled history that came under communist rule in 1946. In 1992, communism fell and ushered in an era that shifted rapidly from collectivism to “total individualism.” Problems exponentially increased as Albanians from the countryside flocked to Tirana in search of jobs, increasing the city’s population nearly threefold in just two decades.

The discussion was sponsored by the Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, and co-sponsored by the Cultural Agents Initiative and the Public Diplomacy Collaborative.

Read the full story on the Harvard Gazette Web site.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/ ... yors-jan10