Why Brothers in Kosovo Build Identical Houses: The House as an Attempt to Adapt to Contradictions of Globalization

Abstract

Remittances following economic and wartime migration are behind the huge number of remittance houses and entire remittance landscapes that have grown up in Kosovo in recent decades. The houses emulate the style and comfort of the villas of European and American suburbia but also in many respects reflect the local life style, the traditional life of (joint) families, but also the dramatic changes that it is undergoing. A model in which two, three, four, or more brothers build a row of houses—one for each brother—has become popular in the building boom in rural and suburban Kosovo in the last two decades. This article interprets these family projects as an attempt by joint families to adapt to the massive cultural change and globalization that (not only) Kosovo has been going through. As a proactive albeit problematic attempt to tackle the (otherwise) intractable tensions and ambivalences that rapid cultural transformations bring. The adaptation involved is a response to challenge at four levels: first, the growing economic inequality between brothers in joint family households; second, the physical absence of the owners of these houses, who are often living abroad; third, the growing desire for individuation and privacy; and finally, the disintegration/reformulation of the very institution of the joint family. It is unclear, however, whether it is really possible for architecture as agent of adaptation to counterbalance the immense social pressures generated by globalization or resolve the intractable contradictions with which it faces families and individuals.