Tirana as contemporary laboratory: living the "green belt"

The city of Tirana, its history, its planning and its recent transformations, highlight a multiplicity of issues that cross several disciplinary fields and contemporary problems. Despite being the result of inconsistent transformations, today it is a very active laboratory in the research of the urban form, in the application of planning principles and in the experimentation of implementation mechanisms of the contemporary project. The research that has been carried out in recent years at the School of Architecture in Bari on the form of Tirana and its sustainable development, has been compared dialectically with Boeri’s Plan. It highlights many themes today at the center of the debate on the transformations of cities in the West as well in the East: the ecological dimension of the city, the contemporary urban form, the preservation of the traces of the historical city and architectural heritage, accessibility and sustainable mobility. Therefore, together with the elaboration of the Boeri’s Plan and then in the phase of its implementation, this problematic field has been explored, elaborating pilot projects that would face in an integrated way the themes mentioned, starting from the most problematic components: the peripheral fringes, dominated by the informal settlements, the disused industrial heritage, the peri-urban and rural space around the city. The first Degree Workshop dealt with the theme of the “green belt” of Tirana, understood as an ecological evolution of the design device that crossed the history of the city and of twentieth-century urban planning, building a green infrastructure project that winds at different scales and designs new spatial arrangements capable of representing a renewed identity and new prospects for sustainable development for the city. Subsequently, a second Degree Workshop focused on the marginal area near the Kombinat, experimenting "new forms of living", through a housing complex created from scratch and interventions for the redevelopment of the existing informal residential fabric, with the aim of verifying strategies and methods applicable in similar contexts.