"Moreover, you scorned our people, and compared the Albanese to sheep, and according to your custom think of us with insults. Nor have you shown yourself to have any knowledge of my race. Our elders were Epirotes, where this Pirro came from, whose force could scarcely support the Romans. This Pirro, who Taranto and many other places of Italy held back with armies. I do not have to speak for the Epiroti. They are very much stronger men than your Tarantini, a species of wet men who are born only to fish. If you want to say that Albania is part of Macedonia I would concede that a lot more of our ancestors were nobles who went as far as India under Alexander the Great and defeated all those peoples with incredible difficulty. From those men come these who you called sheep. But the nature of things is not changed. Why do your men run away in the faces of sheep?"
Letter from Skanderbeg to the Prince of Taranto ▬ Skanderbeg, October 31 1460
Dialogue in Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Transformation
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Dialogue in Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Transformation
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
"I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."~Harry S. Truman