13 minute read
formalising tirana
suzanne harris - brandts , ervin goci
self-built does not mean temporary
When many people think of temporary architecture they conjure images of camping tents, perhaps a pop-up market stall or food truck. But the temporary is also often conflated with informality in what are preferably called ‘self-built communities.’ An example of this is the neighbourhood of 05 Maji (5th of May) on the northern peripheries of Tirana, Albania, originally self-constructed by rural migrants arriving at the capital in the early 1990s following the collapse of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. For decades, residents have established inter-generational roots and supported the city’s socio-economic activity, despite their neighbourhood being unrecognised, and often erroneously framed as ‘impermanent’ or ‘temporary.’ There are deeper historical reasons behind Tirana’s property informality, driven by a nationwide post-communist politico-economic crisis resulting in long periods of legal ambiguity and entire city districts being frozen in ad hoc and contingent bureaucracy. In the decades since the 1990s, residents and their advocates have worked to register, or formalise property, including following an April 2006 law on the legalisation, urbanisation and integration of unauthorised constructions — with varying degrees of success depending largely on the politicians in office and their plans for transforming the city.
On 31 January 2020, the Council of Ministers solidified 05 Maji’s temporary designation by declaring it a ‘forced development area.’ The government claimed such redevelopment was necessary following damage from a 2019 earthquake, and the relocation of residents from other earthquake-effected areas. Yet, schematic proposals to re-develop the district date back to 2012, following the forcible eviction of 21 Roma families in August 2006, leaving 109 people homeless.1 Now, a fresh round of mass evictions, land seizures and demolitions of approximately 400 residential buildings aim to make way for a new neighbourhood of the future: the iconic Tirana Riverside Project, a 29-hectare ‘smart city,’ ‘pandemic-proof’ eco-district for 12,000, designed by the famous Italian firm Stefano Boeri Architetti. The Tirana Riverside Project was proposed as a key component of Prime Minister Edi Rama’s vision to rebrand the Albanian capital, in turn attracting greater tourism and investment to the city. It is connected to the larger TR2030 Masterplan also by Stefano Boeri Architetti, with both iconic proposals held up as evidence that the government is improving Tirana, in turn increasing voter popularity. Yet, in Albania’s flawed democratic context with chronic corruption, concerns these initiatives are greenwashing a type of urban development propelled by money laundering put designers like Boeri in an awkward position and belie their claims that their work is headed toward a more habitable and inclusive future.
Explicitly, there is no legitimate reason for the demolition of the 05 Maji community. Construction is not condemned and the world has dozens of convincing examples of in situ upgrading for self-built communities alongside the infill of new public greenspace. There is also a missing logic in promising housing to those impacted by the earthquake while causing a new humanitarian crisis by displacing current residents. As urban scholars, we found ourselves asking what it would mean to acknowledge this community’s existing strengths, respecting residents’ desires for the future and basic human rights through tenure security. This question brought us to the temporary on several fronts from the suspended violence of a neighbourhood gradually in the unmaking, to the perversion of mass expulsions leading the way for a future of ecological urbanism in flux, and the reality that such iconic urban proposals are themselves often temporary, frozen amidst politics and changes in government.
the suspended violence of a neighbourhood in the unmaking
The experience of being in 05 Maiji underscores how absurd it is to describe this community as temporary. Multi-level, solidly built, reinforced concrete buildings are carefully maintained by inhabitants who have lived here for decades (Fig 03). While walking the streets and talking to residents, the area does nothing but conjure a deep sense of embeddedness and permanence, of inter-generational living and tightknit community. Concrete columns extending from top floors underscore residents’ dreams of remaining in-place (Fig 04). Houses were constructed this way to allow for incremental vertical expansion once children become adults, get married and start their own families, building new apartments above existing ones. It is a highly sustainable approach to urban intensification, both extending the service life of buildings and allowing families to age in-place. In many ways, 05 Maiji is full of the design principles architects strive for, exemplifying a walkable 15 Minute city with a diverse demographic base, small-scale urban agriculture and the fostering of strong socio-cultural networks.
Nonetheless, by 19 January 2022, forced evictions and property demolitions were well underway. In a flash of violence, entire sections of the neighbourhood were reduced to rubble, cherished family memories strewn across the streets for all to see. As compensation, residents were promised replacement apartments and rental subsidies through vague contracts. They were given little choice but to accept their offers. During the years needed to complete the project, residents will need to relocate elsewhere, severed from their current social networks and far from their places of childcare, education and employment. In addition to the social and mental tolls, the economic losses are tremendous, including not only the value of property but also of local economies and business networks, of established places of employment and hybrid live-work spaces. If residents eventually decide to return years from now, they will be thrust into an entirely new way of living: their former custom-built architecture, agricultural plots, livestock and fruit trees replaced with monotonous, generic apartment blocks flanking highly aestheticised recreational corridors. In portions of the neighbourhood already cleared and on-track for completion, there is little optimism that the previous community life can be shoe-horned back into these sterile new apartment buildings. And while residents will soon be able to walk designer dogs through a riverfront leisure spine or play tennis with new upper-middle-class neighbours, they cannot sustain their livelihoods through urban agriculture or customise their residences to accommodate family growth. What is most likely then is that in the face of their inability to meet community needs these apartments will become another type of temporary urbanism, sold off to speculative investors as vacant assets or converted into turnkey Airbnbs.
As of July 2023, approximately 50% of 05 Maji remains frozen as is, partially demolished, partially intact, with residents on constant standby for the next round of demolitions. It is a situation where people perennially prepare their most precious belongings for immediate evacuation, fearful of an eviction that might come today, tomorrow, in a month’s time, or perhaps never at all. 05th Maji is thus temporary not because it is self-built but rather because it is in an ongoing state of threatened erasure—a state that has meant everything is suspended in the temporary: normal daily life put on hold, the desires to invest in and upgrade properties seized. Planting new crops or hanging wedding photos—even cleaning the windows—all potentially acts in vain. The psychological damage of such an existence does not end with demolition but stays with residents in the years to come. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) notes, forced evictions like this “intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and invariably affect the poorest, most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially women, children, minorities.”2
2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Forced Evictions: Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/forced-evictions Accessed 10 May 2023.
The violent erasure of 05 Maji is an example of what Urban Sociologist and Colombia University Professor Saskia Sassen has termed expulsions 3 It is a phenomenon now witnessed across the city and one growing with intensity, as the work of Albanian architect and urban scholar Dorina Pllumbi has shown.4,5 Overall, these expulsions lay bare the challenges of retrofitting cities for more climate-conscious futures and the risks of such efforts being hijacked and greenwashed by corrupt elites.
3. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
4. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Kombinat: The Unseen and Their Architectural Oddkins’. Architectural Design, vol. 92, no. 2, March 2022, pp.30-35. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2790
5. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Is Tirana’s Rapid Transformation Progress or Erasure?’ Kosovo 2.0. 14 July 2022. https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/author/ dorinapllumbi/
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mass expulsions to create a sustainable urbanism in flux?
In the face of a global climate crisis, we have been told that our cities need to be better prepared, freshly equipped with sustainable design features like green corridors to improve air quality, reduce heat islands and enhance local stormwater retention. It follows a longstanding critique that our buildings are too static and unresponsive to their environments. In other words, we need an urbanism that is more fluctuating and temporary. What we have not been told, however, is how implementing such projects in corrupt and semi-authoritarian contexts like Albania’s risks not only failing to accomplish sustainable goals but also catalyses gross human rights violations through forced evictions. Described by Stefano Boeri Architetti as a reclaiming of the landscape, the Tirana Riverside Project stretches two kilometres from east to west, the TR2030 Masterplan then wraps around the urban core in concentric ‘green rings,’ both projects impacting large swaths of the city. It’s a zone so large that it would take over four hours to walk it in its entirety. With whole districts identified for clearance and replacement with new forest trails, it is more a claiming of vulnerable lives to bolster elite power and profits. While “obsessing over the many novel ways a housing complex can be designed to accommodate trees,”6 the project misses the larger mark of protecting civilians and preventing the coerced and involuntary mass displacement of people from their lands and communities. Ironically, it is the proposal itself that has become the greatest threat to area residents, not future climate hazards or pandemics.
As architects and urban designers embrace the idea that cities need to be more integrative of ecological systems, we need to have a serious conversation about what this means when imposed on existing contexts. Simply rolling out a new green carpet over established communities is not going to get us where we want to be, socially or environmentally. We also need to discuss how green initiatives are being usurped by corruption, acting more as illicit revenue generation and money laundering schemes than livelihood improvement in communities.
On a very real level, Stefano Boeri Architetti’s projects impact the entirety of the city, exacerbating affordability far beyond their local footprint through the fuelling of high-end speculative development. The cool calculations of demolition compensation do not take into account the rising cost of living these projects fuel, let alone the embodied energy of destroying buildings and their surroundings. Narratives of ‘restored landscapes’ further work on an ideological level to demoralize existing communities. Native plant species are introduced using the rhetoric of ‘natural belonging’, maliciously implying the unnatural presence of area residents who are largely stigmatized rural migrants framed xenophobically as non-natives in the capital city.
6. Boeri, Stefano, Maria Chiara Pastore and Livia Shamir. Green obsession: Trees towards cities, humans towards forests. Barcelona: Actar, 2021
temporary urban ideals: election cycles and frozen development
Initiatives of the magnitude of TR2030 and the Tirana Riverside Project will require decades to realise, a whole generation of time stuck in temporary construction while a new layer of the city is built up incrementally. During this time, there will be electoral changes and shifting political will. New politicians will make new promises and nullify the existing projects of their predecessors, leaving behind frozen development and a scarred landscape. Our increasingly uncertain existence on this planet likewise means that today’s buzzwords such as ‘smart city,’ ‘zero-emission polycentric neighbourhood,’ and ‘pandemicproof design’ refer to architectural ideals that, too, are temporary, soon rendered obsolete by technological advances and increasingly deficient understandings of what constitutes resiliency. Re-designs, re-calculations, and adjusted goals will all be necessary. There is a risk that the areas seized by the government to realise these projects will be privatised in the future. Once added back to the public land bank to create green corridors, there is no promise these areas will stay public territory. In a few years time, they may be sold-off to new developers keen to profit from idyllic riverfront views. This reality means that the mirages of the Tirana Riverside Project and TR2030 are temporary while having incredible consequences. They are subject to continual alteration as their computer-rendered images are translated into built reality. The value of these projects thus lies less in forging new, stronger communities and more in propping up Albania’s elite. So long as current flawed governance structures remain in place, politicians will continue to turn to these types of iconic urbanism to bolster their wealth and popularity.
For now, the multiple realities of 05 Maji sit uneasily side-by-side in a state of the temporary: the vernacular buildings of a once thriving selfbuilt community are juxtaposed with the violence of demolition sites and new sterile, mass-built, vacant mid-rise apartment blocks. Children play amidst the rumble of nearby bulldozers; families hang laundry adjacent to the destroyed houses of their neighbours; tall orange trees grow beside freshly poured concrete. In 05 Maji, the true costs of formalising Tirana are on display for all to see.
SUZANNE HARRIS-BRANDTS, OAA, is Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University. She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from MIT and is a founding partner of the design-research collaborative Collective Domain.
https://architecture.carleton.ca/archives/people/suzanne-harris-brandts
ERVIN GOCI is a lecturer at the University of Tirana’s Department of Journalism and Communication, and an urban activist engaged in Albanian grassroots movements for tenure security, public space, urban commons and environmental justice
