Tirana Plug-in River: Catalyst Playful Experiences to Revitalize Albanian Informal Settlements

The fall of the Communist dictatorship has changed dramatically the urban structure of the city of Tirana. The original organic structure - and the later Soviet functionalist fabric - has been parasitized by a spread system of informal (and currently illegal) settlements that are perceivable as ‘other spaces’ (Foucault 2000), completely rejected by the historical city. Indeed, the latter generated a system of closed clusters within the urban environment, leading to the creation of a series of barriers which are either physical, psychological and behavioral. For these reasons, the city of Tirana is a kaleidoscopic and deceiving reality, where the explosion of colors and shapes hides the urban conflicts that run underneath and exacerbate the always present social tension and conflict. Previous top-down solutions - proposed by the government - have demonstrated their ineffectiveness due to a positivistic approach that could not take into account the complexity of a vital city in continuous evolution. To offer concrete and long-term solutions to these crises, there is the need for catalytic interventions that can help in the creation of different and overlapping frameworks of action: architectural, social, education, and economical ones. In this paper, we will present the incremental design project ‘Tirana | Plug-in River’, with the aim of demonstrating how multitasking infrastructure (Saggio 2014) can work as positive vectors in the urban fabric using playful dynamics and mechanics, and bottom-up/civic engagement design processes in the existing city where architecture, art and citizenship interaction can operate as a key for a new urban consciousness and reactivation.