The post-socialist urban transformation of tirana in historical perspective: Mapping the ideological dimension of urban growth

Abstract

In contrast to planned cities, where subsequent growth tends to occur mainly at the urban periphery, in contemporary Tirana this trend has been accompanied by the striking densification of existing neighbourhoods through the appropriation of previous public spaces. This transformation of Tirana's built environment has occurred within a very short space of time during which the radically top-down urban planning ideology associated with the communist regime was succeeded in 1991 by an equally radical 'bottom up' model, characterized by mass urban migration and unregulated capitalism. This paper applies space syntax to the question of post-socialist urban transformation. It seeks to understand the extent to which the ideological dimension of morphogenetic processes in Tirana gave rise to distinctive patterns of growth. Space Syntax has a rich tradition in historical studies of urban growth processes. Griffiths (2012) has identified four approaches to 'spatial history' (Griffiths, 2012).This paper's approach is consistent with the second category, that of 'syntactic growth processes'. The research made use of historical cartography and a contemporary aerial map of Tirana to produce a time-series of syntactic models which endeavours to explore the city's growth processes from a configurational perspective. Four distinct historical stages are identified to represent the evolution of Tirana's urban form through contrasting ideological regimes: 1921, 1937, 1989 and 2016. The GIS-based 'cartographic redrawing' method pioneered by Pinho and Oliveria (Pinho & Oliveira, 2009a, 2009b) has been adopted to systematically study Tirana's morphogenesis, working backwards from the contemporary model to remove non-existent elements and readjusting to the changed shape of the urban fabric as needed. In presenting this research, the emphasis will be on the latter period as the prime focus is on the specific character of the postsocialist urban transformations of the city.On the basis of this analysis the research finds that, consistent with the arguments of Tosic (2005) Tirana's expansion is consistent neither with the typical pattern of urban growth on a western model, nor even that of a 'one size fits all' postsocialist transformation (Tosics, 2005). On the contrary, its distinctive features must-in the first instance-be interpreted in the context of Albania's twentieth-century history