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Tirana. Four materials with an impermanent
title (*)
by Federico Zanfi
Publication date: November
2007
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Abstract
The last Regulatory Plan of Tirana started its investigation process
in 1986, and was adopted in 1990: just when the urban planning
culture of the country completed its most advanced tool, its upholding
socio-economic system collapsed.
Consequently the infant Plan, with its load of previsions about
the city’s future, experienced a lonely decade – the 90s were
a time of brutal transformations: in only 13 years, the population
of the Albanian capital triplicates, as its urban form explodes
following unprecedented migration and speculation anxieties.
But this Plan, which to this day remains the only legally binding
document, is now terminally ill, kept alive artificially and unable
to provide support or solutions to the actual state of the city.
Under the Plan’s reassuring and homogenous coloured zoning, under
its area partitions marked by clear lines, there lies a variegated
reality of self-organized micro-transformations which have inverted
its consistency, often completely reversing all urban previsions.
It is impossible to presume how, by only looking at the map, one
could really understand the city’s real consistency.
In this sense, today Tirana lacks a representative image, which
would depict its character and guide the transformation energies
towards a shared course. Production, Housing, Public Space and
Nature – the four inherent elements of the albanian capital, as
its last Regulatory document predicts, have today a provisory
and iridescent nature; to comprehend and describe them is the
main bet that any new form of urban government will have to face.
(*) These notes are a re-edited version of the
essay 'Tirana. Four materials with an impermanent title', written
for Romano, Stefano, editor, 1.60 Insurgent Space. January
2005-September 2006, Tirana, European Cultural Foundation,
to be published in spring 2008.
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