Poliksen Qorri-Dragaj & Hamdi Qorri: rks2 | transcendent locality

The term transcendence implies the process of crossing a boundary that separates two fundamentally different spheres.

For the refugees in the course of the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the circumstance of not being able to return to their homeland for an indefinite period represented a deep caesura in their lives. On the one hand the migrated individuals were physically present in the hostlands, superficially managing their everyday life and functioning in their new environment. But on the other hand, the emotional presence was a different matter: due to the conflict, attention and thoughts revolved around the abandoned homeland, fears and insecurities often did not allow the individuals to arrive at the hostland. They were located in an intermediate state between the physical now and the abandoned before. In this state boundaries between the immanent being in the now and the transcendent being in the mind blur-the migrated individual is in a transcendent locality.

The book considers the impact of transcendent locality on immanent space in the short and long term: in Kosovo it can be very well observed how the return of migrants after the war has affected Kosovar cities and how the social migration networks, which developed in the hostlands, impact on urban space in the form of translocal urbanism. The authors explore these phenomena and opens the debate on how urban planning can respond to these specific conditions in order to create urban resilience and liveable cities.