From "Neither East Nor West" to "We Want Albania as Europe" Reflections on POLIS University and its implementation of resilience development models in Albania

Since the failure of a centralized economy during the last three decades of transition towards a market economy, Albania has been facing severe political, societal, and economic changes. The process of transformation has provoked a series of accelerations, although the country is still is struggling with past inertias. The result of such process has been a fragile and not yet adaptive urban environment, characterized mostly by two opposite phenomena: 1) on the one hand, the uncontrollable growth of the informal settlements, usually blamed by the State, but meantime accepted thorough a legal process of the formalization; 2) on the other hand, the rise of the so-called ‘turbo architecture’ phenomena, an almost schizophrenic design trend that naively tried to recompose the fracture between a new eclectic opening towards “western” formal influences, and the need to preserve one’s private space. In opposition to that, since early 90s, the work philosophy of the Co-Plan Institute – the founding origin of POLIS University - aimed for activating bottom-up dynamics in the urban space through fostering participatory processes that could engage communities and public agencies towards more sustainable transformations. Despite the undeniable success of this research and practice, the last years have seen the rise of new problems that are currently and strongly testing the physical spaces of the Albanian cities and their capacities to adapt and survive in the years to come. The destructive earthquake of November 2019 was just the latest demonstration of a series of tangible – and intangible – critical points (including flooding, fires, pollution, financial shocks, etc.) that urged POLIS / CoPLAN staff to develop new resilient and adaptive models where the city – and the territory at large – is not seen as a static entity but as evolutive spaces and dynamic actors able to reorganize themself and not simply to survive, but to ensure a resilient Albania for the challenges of the 21st century. In this contribution, we will present the work of POLIS University and Co-Plan Institute – as resilient institutions themselves – towards the development of new development models for 21st century Albania. From the get-go, we didn’t want to frame our reflection only under one perspective, but we aimed for presenting the different synergic strategies that we have been developing to address several issues (political, architectural, spatial, environmental, etc.) and for using this paper as a selfreflective moment to define where we currently stand, and which future path we can set to develop a positive resilience agenda.