Tirana has been the capital of Albania since 1920. Despite the fact that new King Zog began to cede Albania's sovereignty to Fascist Italy as early as 1928, the Italians invaded Albania in 1939. Albanian nationalist groups, including communist partisans, fought the Italians and the Germans till October 1944, when they threw the Germans out. Albania allied itself with Stalin’s Soviet Union but broke with the Soviets in 1960 over de-Stalinization. A strong political alliance with China followed, bringing several billion dollars in aid, though it was curtailed after 1974 and cut off altogether in 1978, when Albania objected to policy shifts after the death Mao Zedong. Widespread purges of officials were carried out in the 1970s.

Enver Hoxha, secretary general of the Albanian Communist Party, died in 1985. Shaken by general strikes and urban opposition, the Communists were routed and ousted in the elections of March 1992, amid social unrest and general economic collapse, after which Tirana experienced its fastest ever population growth as people from rural areas streamed into the capital. In 1990 the city had a population of 300,000; it now stands at around a million.

Occupation

Tirana has changed dramatically since the nineties. Post-Communist Tirana experienced democracy, mass immigration and urban expansion, desperate financial crisis, foreign military intervention and ruthless economic growth. People from the countryside simply set up camp on the outskirts of the city. Property boundaries had been forgotten after decades of collectivization. Space was there for the taking, public space was a hated and failed socialist concept left over from the bad old days; plots of land were simply seized. The banks of the Lana River and the central park were filled up with all sorts of buildings: housing, tiny business enterprises, kiosks and bars.

Colours

From this point, public space as a concept had to be reinvented; Tirana had to find mental space for public space. Recent interventions by Mayor Edi Rama have given impetus to the creation of this mental space. Such strange policies as a massive campaign to repaint old social housing blocks were prompted by the absence of public funds: these interventions concentrated on image because the battleground for the creation of public space was the field of public imagery. Ideology still came first.

The colour project was the first step in an urban strategy meant to transform the city, or at least to control frantic urban growth following economic revival. In fact, Tirana was in the middle of a boom; a sincere passion for concrete collided with the unreliability of the Albanian banking system in an explosion that caused the riots of 1997. Remittances from abroad and the flourishing money laundering industry combined to produce a very different type of urban growth: speculative building in the centre for the new Albanian bourgeoisie stacks of apartments owned by people living and working abroad.

Colours was an announcement that public space was possible and, to a certain extent, desirable. The colours campaign was anything but democratic: ‘not that everyone could pick a colour, because it would become gray. No consensus. The mayor chose. No democracy, but an avant-garde democratization.’ To a certain extent Leninism was still at work; the definition of a public realm was, once again, a matter of top-down intervention. Should we consider it a bad idea, in conflict with our democratic ideals, or should we consider it a model? Somehow it worked. Public spaces began to appear. The squatter settlements along the canal were turned into a tiny but beautiful linear green promenade, which is now a magnificent example of garden design, with sculpted hedges and random trees, a classicist reinterpretation of the 80s OMA.

Monuments

Ideology comes first, but it does not come alone. The new attitude towards public space served to reveal the resilient quality of unplanned Tirana urbanism. The simple Brasini Square scheme with the wide axis connecting all governmental buildings (an astonishing parade of all kinds of totalitarian architecture) retained its power. It is an oddly beautiful structure, in a completely unpredictable city. The legacy of the fascist/Stalinist urbanism is plain to see in the private city expansion that is interrupted by unpredictable monumental incidents, giving the city a strangely violent beauty.

Scanderbeg Square is a fine example; it has seen the insertion of large, monumental masses, such as the Palace of Culture, the National Museum and the Hotel Tirana that unsettle the square and produce a very odd openness. The absolute symmetry established by the Museum and the Palace of Culture do not coincide with, nor do they match, the original Brasini scheme. This awkward accumulation of contradictory axial compositions produces an amazing urban environment. As a result of a series of totalitarian interventions, Scanderbeg Square is remarkably open and light. In the esplanade once filled by the base of the Enver Hoxha monument, kids can today rent a toy car and drive in circles in a barbaric, unwittingly capitalist dance. At the other side of the square the muezzin leads the call to evening prayer while in the middle is the usual traffic jam.

Types

The first two floors of every building were designed as shop space. As the buildings rarely have more than eight storeys, fully a quarter of the built volume has public access. Such an abundance of commercial space has created a surprisingly public city of small libraries, swimming-pools, cinemas and theatres. But does density work without a program?

Fabric

The surviving Stalinist city is monumental, though delicate fragments of a finer city fabric survive in between the recent developments. The buildings of socialist Tirana were no higher than four storeys and the distances between the blocks were never more than twenty meters. The gaps between buildings automatically became domestic public spaces. A brilliantly clumsy planning technique has produced a city fabric that is far from alienating (consider similar attempts with eight to ten storey buildings in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia). As a result, in certain parts of Tirana, trees of a certain age are still taller than the buildings; somehow Tirana remains rural and familiar.

So architecture is not completely irrelevant in the enabling of public life. Spaces in the city matter, which of course will sound terribly naïve to architects. Spaces imply possibilities and it is not always the most gentle architecture that is the most effective creator of public space. Apart from all the limitations of its current development, Tirana seems aware, as a city, of the relevance of its form. In the end the most impressive thing in the entire strategy of the Tirana municipality is that it has been able to elude the fancy colours it used when it first started thinking about the city. Ideology comes first, but it does not come alone. Which other European administration is, at present, as clever as this and as conscious of its urban assets?

I love to play

‘We will bring children closer to the city of the future, the city where everyone finds his place and where nobody feels excluded by development, or density or anything else.’

How it was before

The appropriation of spaces between residential blocks that was characteristic of the nineties led to critical shortages of the public spaces essential to the quality of life deserved by residents of all ages. The people living in the blocks needed open space for rest and recreation, particularly the children who every day told their parents that they want somewhere to play. In recent years the city council of Tirana has initiated a continuing program of refurbishing the run-down infrastructure of the residential blocks built during the socialist period. Last year this initiative was given impetus by the provision of modest playgrounds for the youngsters of those blocks through the ‘I LOVE TO PLAY!’ project.

When introducing this project Mayor Edi Rama declared: ‘My ambition is that every child should have a playground where every grandparent can spend time with her or his grandchildren and I believe that this project will gradually give more opportunities to every neighbourhood. We are preparing many playground projects to bring children closer to the city of the future, the city where everyone finds his own place and where nobody feels excluded by development, or density or anything else.’

The Aim of Intervention

The ‘I LOVE TO PLAY!’ project aims to improve every young citizen’s quality of life by the provision of small neighbourhood public spaces. This new project by the city council of Tirana aims to construct mini sports fields - small but indispensable playgrounds in all community spaces of the capital so that all the children can find a safe attractive place where they can play and grow up together, because above all, this kind of sporting entertainment enhances physical fitness and social cohesion. Construction of these mini fields will offer the children a marvellous opportunity to spend their free time with others in a safe valuable place.

Description of the Intervention

Faced with the lack of neighbourhood recreational spaces, the city council had the idea of utilizing the many blind walls characteristic of socialist residential blocks, by turning the patches of ground next to them into basketball fields. Where there is sufficient space, sports fields can be laid out to accommodate a range of sporting activities. The project is simple, but its impact is great. It started by identifying and marking every suitable space in each of the neighbourhoods of Tirana. The next step was to prepare a modest urban project that would provide the selected places with the necessary urban elements to facilitate the proper functioning of the children’s sport fields. The modest financial burden of this project was covered by the council budget in concert with private donations of money, materials and expertise towards the construction of local sports fields. Prompt realization of the Mayor’s vision for providing Tirana with the first one hundred ‘I LOVE TO PLAY!’ fields depended on close community collaboration in the identification of likely available spaces within local neighbourhoods.

At the opening of one such project the Mayor declared: ‘This is already a well-known project, but I welcome the opportunity of inviting all the communities and all the residents of the capital to be part of this project, by passing their considered needs on to the council staff. Assisting in the financing of these excellent projects will bring a huge symbolic importance for a modest expenditure. We want to replicate this pattern all over the city with the full collaboration of the community, to cultivate the daily community spirit in the belief that this is a necessity for a city that wants to involve everybody in the decision-making process and for the improvement of the social life for all of us.’

Assessment

The citizens of Tirana have reacted positively to this new project and demand is increasing daily. The selection process of sites for sports and playing fields indicate how great is the need for this sort of initiative. It gives great pleasure to see the effects of this simple but effective idea in the community; watching how children feel safe playing together away from traffic despite the present lack of infrastructure.

The ‘I LOVE TO PLAY!’ project has brought about a growing interest from all sides of the community, young and old, who keep submitting their requests to the city council for their own sports fields and playgrounds within their own neighbourhoods. Based on the community interest and the proven success of the project, the Tirana City Council will continue the intensive selection of such spaces, which, as the Mayor Edi Rama has declared, will reach one hundred by the end of 2008.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli & Ulrike Franzel & Adelina Greca