Vjosa riverine environments: Approaching dynamic continuity

Povzetek

The Vjosa, a relatively well-known river of South East Europe, has been a subject of numerous attempts of infrastructural interventions such as the construction of hydropower plants for more than a decade. This “pearl” of the Blue Heart of Europe, as the river is often called by various activists, scientists and media, is now also referred to as a “dynamic equilibrium” and “geological continuum”. The article explores the dynamic and uneven character of the Vjosa, which is embodied in the lives of its people as much as their lives are spatialized in its riverine environments. While activists, scientists, and the media praise the Vjosa’s continuous dynamism, local people have an ambivalent relationship to it. On the one hand, they fear the Vjosa’s “wild” character, as it floods their fields and “eats up” their soil, whereas, on the other, they appreciate its vitality because it provides their fields with water and minerals. By delving into this ambiguous nature of the Vjosa, this article seeks to rethink the meaning of dynamics, continuity, stability, fixity, and rupture at the brink of the modern quest for control over changing environments. By intersecting different scales—social, geographical, hydrological, historical, political, and economic—it explores the mutuality of entanglements, disentanglements, and transformations that configure the Vjosa’s riverine environments. We argue that the dynamic, wild, and ambiguous nature of the Vjosa is part of the structural continuity or so-called “landscape structure” that seeks to resist the contemporary quest for fixity, stability, and control.