Introduction from the Editors

This year, 2020, marks Tirana’s 100th anniversary as the capital of Albania. Comparing photos of a bucolic Tirana in 1920 with the urban explosion witnessed from Polis University’s fourth floor today, inevitably raises questions about the form of the city: What is the form of the city? Can the city have a form? Such questions express uncertainty, but they also introduce the concept of normativity, insofar as they posit a distinction between the form of the city and its lack. The nineteenth and twentieth century theorists and architects, as diverse as Cerdà and Camillo Sitte, adopted the normativity of organism in order to think the form of the ever-expanding modern city as self-generated. However, the frenzied and unbridled growth of our cities, especially in the current context of global pandemics, renders the concept of self-generation suspect. Theories like urban archipelagos turn out to be ineffective insofar they are preoccupied only with the normative islands but not with the non-normativity outside and between the islands. What is at stake today is precisely an updated normativity of the whole that is guided by a sense of self-limitation; that “contests production itself” and the “overriding principle”1 of infinite growth and self-generation. The objective of Forum A+P 22nd issue is to draw current research and design practices, as well as theoretical speculations on the topic of uncertainty and non-normativity in multiple scales and contexts, in and from the city of Tirana. [...]