Understanding Emergent Urbanism The Case of Tirana, Albania

he canonical architectural studies have handed us the idea that city is the result of a series of top-down procedures - and related documentary materials - which depict a rigid and hardly con- testable direction of development of our urban tissues. Looking at the different regulatory plans throughout which contempo- rary cities have been developed, it is quite difficult to perceive the human component of such spaces, leaving us to wander in a series of linear relations where the final form is predetermined by external judging eyes. But if we look at the city as a living being, characterized from the different complex entities that in- habit it and interact among each others, is it possible to bring the real city - or as the author underlines, the city of everyday life - close to conventional planning? [...]