Inorganic City: A Living Autopsy of Tirana

This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it . . . What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 

They began to appear suddenly, between cat memes and infographics: sleek images of skyscrapers against the backdrop of purple-orange clouds, the romantic contrast between a velvet evening sky and golden city lights. I sent one of these videos to my brother. His response: “Damn, Tirana looks cool.” From the bird’s-eye perspective of a drone, Tirana does look cool, and it seems that the dream of modernity that has animated the post-Communist transition period, and inspired the urban vision of its artist-turned-mayor-turned-Prime Minister Edi Rama, is finally coming true. The desire for a certain idea of the modern is palpable throughout Tirana—in the silhouettes of restaurants with indistinguishable menus, the shimmering façades of luxury brand stores, the proliferation of Starbucks imitation chains, to say nothing of the emergence of American staples like KFC and Burger King. In the midst of so much upheaval, the people of Tirana are beset by a preemptive nostalgia for that which is not yet entirely lost, but soon will be: cheap sandwiches, public parks, and Turkish coffees at fifty cents. But nostalgia has not stopped people from flocking to these new spaces; it hasn’t stopped their aspiration to participate in the making of a modern city, and to recognize themselves as modern in turn. 

When I use the adjective cool to describe Tirana, the word rings clichéd, outdated, even a bit pathetic. But that’s also why it works. Cool is shorthand for the aesthetic impetus that has defined the Albanian imaginary over the past thirty years; to a certain extent, living in a “cool” city was the promised land that allowed people to swallow the bitter pill of the 1990s neoliberal shock doctrine. I refer to it as an aesthetic because the modernity that we desire is not only about achieving higher standards of living that would include public services, plenty of green spaces, and affordable housing. The desire for modernity is above all a desire for a specific lifestyle that we imagine unfolds in shiny urban spaces like New York, Paris, or London. And like all things wanted a bit too strongly and earnestly, especially when imposed at the cost of our well-being by a government which treats citizens and public spaces as disposable, such desires have a whiff of the pathetic to them. A good example of this brand of self-fashioning for the imagined Western gaze is the current Mayor of Tirana (and Rama’s embattled protégé), Erion Veliaj, who often shows up to public events donning Ivy League T-shirts, although he himself studied at the respectable Grand Valley State University in Michigan. 

Unsurprisingly, the cost of this rush towards modernity is historical erasure and gentrification. A narrative is already taking shape around Tirana’s thirty-year transformation, especially in the last decade under Rama’s government. Entire swathes of Tirana have been destroyed under the pretext that they were built illegally or damaged by two consecutive earthquakes in 2019. Meanwhile, housing prices soar artificially, helped by an influx of dubious cash, and locals are pushed out of the city—or the country altogether. Cultural critics like Dorina Pllumbi and Vincent W.J. Van Gerven Oei have written extensively and persuasively about how this boom in construction is fueled by corruption, and the way Prime Minister Rama has used a well-oiled media machine and his artistic past to launder his reputation in the Western press. What feels like the point of no return came in May 2020, when the Municipality of Tirana razed the historic National Theater to the ground, while activists who had been fighting for years for its survival slept inside. Since then, destruction has accelerated, and green spaces, historic buildings, and natural monuments are swept aside with little transparency to make way for futuristic behemoths of glass and steel.

This desire for the modern is intrinsically tied to the desire for Westernness (and whiteness).  But as a desire, it is not unique to the present. In his 2003 book Kulla e Sahatit (The Clock Tower), literary critic Ardian Vehbiu explains how the clock tower of Tirana, an iconic feature of the city’s skyline constructed in the early nineteenth century, was used by the Albanian monarchy in the 1920s to signal Albania’s readiness for Europe: “Perhaps in the years of the monarchy, when there was still that illusion that we deserved modernity, the tower had come to symbolize Europe itself, a continent which Albania not only belonged to, but yearned to join with all its might.” (This, and all following quotations, are translated by myself.) Vehbiu’s text is a work of auto-theory that combines his memories of growing up in Tirana with urban and literary criticism. Throughout, he demonstrates how the meaning of monuments changes over time, but also how they come to bear the burden of our illusions (and even delusions). Written in the early 1990s, Vehbiu insightfully maps out this dual desire for Europe and modernity, and how it is wrapped up in the tension of feeling like we have always belonged to the West, and merely need the West to remember. In his book-length essay Identiteti Evropian i Shqiptarëve (The European Identity of Albanians), Ismail Kadare, Albania’s premier literary export, makes the same point, but less critically and much more earnestly. It is a text that betrays Kadare’s orientalism, as he disavows the country’s Ottoman inheritance and the (to him) shameful burden of Albania’s Muslim population to make a case for our Western roots. Today, the race towards the West and modernity is part of the ideological bedrock that motivates the architects behind Tirana’s urban restructuring. “We will make Tirana like Tokyo,” Veliaj said on a live stream from the Japanese capital during the delayed 2020 Olympics. Tirana, a simulacrum of the idealized twenty-first-century city.

However, novels, memoirs, and even architectural histories of Tirana tell a much more complicated story of urban transformation and civic resistance. Tirana’s history is that of a city long shaped by the push and pull between the spontaneous creations of its inhabitants, and the ideological projects of authoritarian governments who, when they come to power, try to rupture the connection with the past, imposing their own vision for what the capital is meant to be. Arba Baxhaku summarizes this century-long dynamic in Floating Identities (2021), a book on Tirana’s architectural history: 

Tirana was born from the accumulation of miscellaneous references… the Eastern influences of the Ottoman era when the city originated, comprised of intimate spaces, gardens, mosques and bazaars; the European tradition primarily recognizable in the classical forms and monument-heavy architecture of the Fascist period that laid the foundations of Tirana as capital of Albania; the Communist utopia that gave the city its housing blocs, spacious squares and public spaces; and finally the present attempts to fashion a new identity for the city.

For centuries, Tirana was merely a resting spot, created spontaneously because located at the intersection of roads to major port cities. With the fall of the Ottoman empire and its capital-city status, accorded in 1920, Tirana began an anxious search for a new identity that led to the “the physical destruction of many symbols of Islamic culture . . . in the pursuit of the iconic Western city,” Baxhaku writes. Every twentieth-century Albanian government, from King Zog I’s monarchy in the 1920s to Rama’s contemporary endeavors has wrestled with the city’s past, trying to erase its history for the imperatives of their own ideological projects. But Baxhaku’s book, as Vehbiu’s memoir, showcases how the impulse for total control chafes against the unruly nature of a living and breathing city. These books become archives of possibility, of those figures who have battled it out with the megalomaniac ambitions of rulers drunk on their own self-mythology. They haven’t always won, but their pages hold traces of ordinary lives, loving gestures, and linguistic quirks that have outlasted governments and monuments. 

*

It can be hard to find comfort in literature when you walk around Tirana and see a city turned into a perpetual construction site incubating glamorous skyscrapers. Perhaps nothing symbolizes the victory of the soulless sleek better than the Pyramid of Tirana. Here’s the thing about the Pyramid: Knowing its history means being reminded constantly of its original purposes. But herein lies the catch: knowing its history. The Pyramid was not a place I associated instinctively with Communism. I don’t even remember when I learned that it was built to commemorate Enver Hoxha. I am sure it was embarrassingly late, probably right on the heels of the debates taking place around 2010 about its potential demolition. Putatively, the discussions about the demolition of the Pyramid were about reframing Albania’s relationship to our Communist past. Could something built to glorify the architect of a dictatorship ever be scrubbed of those associations? Didn’t its continued existence present a blight, an offense to the thousands who had suffered under Hoxha’s yoke, to those who had lost not just property and fortunes, but people or years of their lives in labor camps? If the Pyramid was constructed to lend Hoxha immortality, it felt powerful to deny him that. But in reality, genuine concerns about the whitewashing of history intermixed with far more prosaic wishes: The Pyramid occupies prime real estate along Tirana’s main artery. Plans to use the area to build a new Parliament or a new opera house meant first and foremost opportunities for protracted construction projects, bloated budgets, and replenished pockets. 

I am supposed to want the Pyramid to survive because it presents what French historian Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, a site of memory where the past seeps into the present. Even the circuitous debates about its survival and repurposing provided us with the opportunity to engage with history. Perhaps as long as we keep negotiating its meaning in public forums, there is still a lot to be gained from its existence. But it has never mattered to me that the Pyramid, or the Palace of Congresses a few meters away, were these giant portents of Communist power. Or that the cobblestones that I have been walking on were laid down by the architects of Italy’s Fascist regime before and after it invaded Albania in 1939. I am tethered to the physical spaces of Tirana by my memories alone. They have no history but my own. 

Something about the fabric of time that divides me from my past is much thinner around the Pyramid. For most of the 2010s, the Pyramid was unapproachable, its perimeter all boarded up and the structure itself dilapidated: windows smashed up, most of the marble on its surfaces stolen. And yet, every time I circled that neighborhood, I felt a gravitational pull that took me back to Tirana in the 1990s. I am five again, it’s a summer afternoon and my mom has brought me and my brother to the Pyramid. There were always crowds at its feet, dozens of other parents trying to dissuade their kids from doing what we were there to do in the first place: climbing it. I remember the sensation of crawling against gravity on its speckled tiles, trying to reach the top. And I remember the adrenaline rush of giving into gravity, the sun-heated marble sticking to my thighs and the friction against my skin as I slid back to the bottom. The elation of those moments was followed by a minor sense of panic if I failed to see my mother’s face waiting for me, or when I was welcomed by the policemen who had come to disband everyone. Over the years, teenage boys continued to climb to the very top, although the exposed cement and broken windows must have been more dangerous than the slippery marble. 

In 2018, the Albanian government hired the Dutch architectural powerhouse MVRDV to turn the derelict pyramid into a multipurpose space, including a tech hub for children and teenagers. The Pyramid is one of two major projects MVRDV is responsible for in the new Tirana: another is the ostentatious Skanderbeg Building, a structure smack in the center of Tirana’s increasingly dense center in the shape of the country’s national hero. These close collaborations with foreign architecture firms known for their idiosyncratic designs are a defining feature of Rama’s vision for the city: “Tirana 2030.” Under this project, Tirana’s urban sprawl—a phenomenon that has marked the city ever since the fall of the Communist regime, leading to its population mushrooming to over half a million people—will be concentrated into a highly dense and green metropolitan center. Tirana 2030 has received widespread criticism, as activists and citizens in Tirana accuse the Municipality of Tirana of destroying history and public spaces, and lying to citizens. “Over the past ten years there has been a very aggressive attitude by the municipality in trying to sell the idea that modernity comes from tearing down old buildings and creating spectacular contemporary architecture,” architect and activist Doriana Musai told Bloomberg. 

As these architectural projects face backlash at home, where the modernization of Tirana is accomplished at the expense of the city’s historical and social fabric, MVRDV’s reconstruction of the Pyramid received glowing reviews from the likes of The Guardian. In general, Rama has been quite adept at selling his vision to the European press. This warm reception is understandable. Couched in the verbiage of development and EU bureaucratese, Tirana’s transformation signals our readiness to join the “European family.” This has not translated into more green spaces or reliable public transportation. Instead, modernity has been arrested at the level of aesthetics. In The Guardian, the new Pyramid is praised for having captured the layered history of the site: the slopes I used to climb have been transformed into stairs, and the surrounding colorful box-like constructions harken back to the informal kiosks that littered the banks of the modest Lana River and whose dismantling is one of Rama’s enduring legacies from his days as mayor of the city. 

I visited the new Pyramid in December 2023 with my family, after years of skirting its edges. I tend to romanticize things, so I was expecting some revelation as I climbed stairs of white concrete, but the truth is that as I looked out at the dark expanse of Tirana twenty years later, the past remained inaccessible. In those moments, it seemed that my worst fears had been realized. While the shape of the Pyramid remained largely the same, it was wholly vacated of anything that felt mine. Whatever relationship I had to that building was gone.  

*

When monuments fail us, words provide the last respite. As I worried about losing my memories, I found myself searching for books that would remind me of what Tirana used to be, of the history and lives behind monuments gone or scrubbed of context. Eventually, I stumbled on a 2020 memoir, Dekalogu i një Lagje Tiranase (Ten Meditations on a Tirana neighborhood). Pocket-sized, Dekalogu’s orange cover features a black-and-white photograph of a traditional Tirana home juxtaposed against a post-Communist apartment block that easily dwarfs it. The book tells the almost century-long history of the house where its publisher is currently housed. Its subtitle, “A confessional essay on what we lose,” is conjugated in the present, gesturing towards the inexorability of loss as intrinsic to the human condition. But there is still a condemnation at its heart, for while loss may be inevitable, the loss of Tirana’s history has been consciously orchestrated over the decades: “Of course, like other major cities, Tirana’s hybrid culture is the natural consequence of its expansion and development. Yet, the inability to preserve even a trace of Tirana’s original layout has erased the city’s discursive identity, impoverishing its present character,” its anonymous author tells us.  

Whatever is unique to Tirana is defined partially by the forces of capital H history: the decisions of mayors, prime ministers, and Kings. But it is also made up of the individual histories of its inhabitants, and the relationship that its dwellers create with the spaces they have made their homes. In that sense, I was moved by the book’s unapologetic opening statement: “The idea that home and memory are one and the same thing is the starting point of this text.” I found echoes of a passage in Proust’s Against Sainte-Beuve, a collection of essays written when he had momentarily given up on In Search of Lost Time. In it, Proust outlines his belief that our memories find refuge in ordinary objects: “Each hour of our life, the moment it expires, it is reincarnated or hides in some material object. That memory becomes its captive, and so it remains unless we rediscover the object and are able to recognize the memory, call it back to life, and deliver it from its captivity.” I know what both authors mean. In some ways, my love for Tirana is indelible because I walk its corners and run into my childhood self all the time: My sense of memory is tethered to the existence of particular buildings, streets, and street corners. I wonder if these sensations would be so vivid if these places did not or no longer existed. Would my mind be enough to conjure them to life? As the distance between these events and my present grows longer, I find myself forgetting things and names I was sure would remain unshakable. And in Tirana, those mementos that jogged my memory are growing fewer and fewer, each façade rendered indistinguishable.

On MVRDV’s website, the company lists all “the lives that the Pyramid” had lived before they remade it for a new century. I have memories in almost every era. After all, the Pyramid of Tirana brings back easy word associations, like the fall of the pyramid schemes and the ensuing civil unrest of 1997. But mostly the Pyramid of Tirana is the good memories: the afternoons  at a café called “Mumja”; the visits to my dad’s place of work, whose offices were hosted in the back of the Pyramid. The summer festivals where we ate soft bread with sausages, and fried dough covered in ketchup and mayonnaise, or when we bought pizza slices from a tiny kiosk called Laguna. I remember rummaging through stacks of bootleg CDs, begging my mom to let me buy a collection of Italian songs that had Michele Zarrillo’s “Una Rosa Blu,” a favorite song that I didn’t own yet.  

I must admit there is something childish and petulant in this desire of mine to reminisce, this demand that something about the way I have experienced Tirana, my private memories, be recorded publicly for fear of losing them to time. But in Dekalogu, Krymi reminds me that “[home] is also the remembrance of how light falls in a room, or how objects are organized in space [but also] the magnetic force of the culture that determined their position, of the lives that lived through them and whose history is never theirs alone.” I realize in reading this paragraph that my desires were not necessarily selfish. If we make a space our own through our memories and experiences, that power has been wrenched away from us to some degree, including in the way so many of these places have become unaffordable or inaccessible. Everything is precarious, parks and libraries and coffeeshops sometimes lasting so ephemerally you forget their name before you have even a chance to learn it. In this sense, like many other cities transformed by the demands of capital and neoliberalism, Tirana has become an inorganic city.

*

An inorganic city is a city whose urban transformations respond to needs that are not those of its inhabitants. In an inorganic city, housing units built by internal migrants are razed to the ground rather than legalized, to make way for highways or high-rises whose rents are so expensive, the workers exploited for their construction cannot afford them. An inorganic city is an exceedingly privatized one, as the focus is less about making a city livable, as much as commodifying every experience. If an inorganic city is not built for its citizens, then who is it built for? Well, tourists are the most direct incarnation of the promise of profit, so partially for them. For that reason, an inorganic city becomes a city without history, if history is about the sustained relationship and sense of ownership that people establish with the spaces they inhabit. Instead, what we encounter is an artificial history of make-believe. In Tirana proper, historical buildings are decimated to make way for the new, while discussions about memory and place are bracketed so that history can be tamed or weaponized, like in the case of the National Theater whose fascist DNA was conveniently brought up to justify its demolition, despite the fact that most of Tirana’s main boulevard were also ideated and built by Italian architects. But above all, history in an inorganic city serves as entertainment, as fantasy fulfillment. 

There is no dearth of such examples around Tirana, or Albania for that matter. There is the way the Municipality of Tirana has exploited tourists’ passion for the exotic, often represented in the figure of the Communist-era bunkers. For some tourists, the bunkers are a delightful symptom of Hoxha’s paranoia, the subject of many articles and blog posts that tend to overstate their presence. Or perhaps they do not exaggerate it, but what to us has always been commonplace is to them strange and thus fodder for their fantasies. Indeed, there is something sinister about Albania’s transformation into a space where a certain type of tourist can sublimate their desire to experience Communism. The Albanian government has certainly capitalized on it: Tirana’s two most popular museums, Bunk’Art 1 and Bunk’Art 2, marry the fascination for bunkers with the hunger for experience. The problem with Bunk’Art and its sibling museum, House of Leaves (which chronicles the history of Sigurimi, the Communist Party’s surveillance apparatus), is performativity for the sake of interactivity. There are rooms where you can search for hidden bugs, and others where you are surrounded by whispers to mimic the feeling of being spied on. There is nothing particularly informative about it. It feels more like visiting a haunted house straight out of a cheap carnival.

My formulation of the inorganic city is partially indebted to René Boer’s concept of the smooth city, cited by Kate Wagner in her essay on twenty-first-century urban planning. But more than anything, it is a response to Baxhaku’s conceptualization of Tirana as a spontaneous city in Floating Identities. Tracing Tirana’s urban development, Baxhaku makes the case that for most of its history, the city’s layout was informed by Ottoman architecture: “Tirana is an open city and, as it often happened in Ottoman settlements, its perimeter was not bound by a wall. Instead, the city is defined by its uninterrupted relationship to the surrounding landscape.” Originally, Tirana’s neighborhoods were organized around mosques, bazaars, and cemeteries. The city was full of low-rise homes with non-continuous rooms and a small courtyard. Only a few of these historic houses survive today. Recently, two more were demolished to make way for MVRDV’s Skenderbeg skyscraper. The houses that do remain are constantly under threat, as developers can afford to pay good sums to the families who own them. 

In Baxhaku’s history, Tirana’s spontaneity was countered by three subsequent governments who tried to fashion the city into a modern capital. On an “architecture without architects” that responded to the needs of its local population was imposed the rationalist and geometric planning of European architecture. From the monarchy of King Zog I and its collaboration with Italian architects, to the Fascist occupation of 1939–1944, and finally to the fifty-year dictatorship of Enver Hoxha—Tirana’s twentieth century is defined less by what it was than what it could be, subsumed to the desires of autocrats with big ambitions. For the architects of modern Tirana, the city has “no past” to be maintained, only a future forever in the process of becoming. According to Baxhaku, the dream of European modernity that was instilled by the Italian architects of Tirana’s initial transformation—and put on pause during the Communist frenzy to provide housing to a booming population in an impersonal architectural style that aimed to transcend history—still haunts the capital. We see its incarnation in the rush towards modernization of the present government. This is no mere conjecture: Stefano Boeri, the Italian architect hired by Rama to plan Tirana 2030, directly cites the 1925 Masterplan in his vision for the city.

But perhaps the most surprising statement I came across in Baxhaku’s book is her assessment of the post-Communist boom in informal construction. Growing up in 1990s Tirana, I became an expert in the architectural vocabulary of the city. I was taught to disdain the “shtesa” (additions) made to existing Communist buildings by families eager for more space to breathe after fifty years of forced proximity. The kiosks that mushroomed around the city as independent vendors began to use the banks of the Lana River to sell food, clothes, and newspapers, were a problem to be solved. The urban history of Tirana in my childhood was the fight over property recognition and protracted battles for the return of the land collectivized under Hoxha’s regime. Despite the fragmentary and hyper-individualistic nature of such constructions, Baxhaku finds something worth reclaiming in their spontaneity, in the way they respond to the needs of those who live in Tirana and were trying to make a home out of the city: “The alienated citizen, forced for a long time to eradicate their individuality for the sake of conforming to the masses, now seeks variety by multiplying images.” 

And yet, like other transformations that Tirana underwent throughout the past century, this rebellion against all things public that marked the fall of Communism became a rebellion against all things historical. It also became a rebellion against community that has made it easier, right now, to accept the way private property is encroaching on public spaces. Hyper-individuality seemed like a natural response to the forced conformism of fifty years of dictatorship, but the consequences continue to be devastating.   

*

It is futile to expect a place never to change, especially as you come and go, while newcomers make it their home. I was thinking about this as I leafed through Floating Identities, where I was surprised to see spaces familiar to me defamiliarized in the pages of Baxhaku’s history of Tirana. Merely a century ago, the Shallvare district, which I have always known to contain a row of communist-era buildings and later an island-like construction now known as Taiwan, was nothing but an expanse of green fields. The book features pictures of that very same street constructed brick by brick to create a city worthy of a capital. It also has pictures and archival plans of the neighborhood I grew up in, colloquially called 1 Maji, before it had any of the buildings that make that space recognizable as my home. This to say that the city does not belong just to me, but has a history beyond my own. But then again, as migration continues and people are priced out of Tirana’s center, does it belong to anyone else either? 

As I struggle to track my memories of Tirana from within an avalanche of anecdotes, I am reminded of warnings from writers dear to me. Annie Ernaux in Alison Strayer’s translation: All images will disappear. Maria Stepanova in Sasha Dugdale’s: There is too much history. In Memory of Memory reminds me to be wary of the atavistic call for narrative through which I can invent a history or a connection when there is none, conjuring an authentic past in an attempt to redeem the present. It seems all such memoirs deal with the precarity of their own ambitions, the trap of the desire for authenticity even in the knowledge that such a past never existed. To know it will not last and to still long to tell it. To want to restore a sense of history to these sleek spaces that seemingly teach us about the past, but only through artificial gestures and shallow surfaces.

A few days ago, I returned to the Pyramid to get bubble tea with a friend. From the inside, the plastic chairs of the little box where the store is housed already look rather sad; my friend wondered out loud if any of the boxes, their paint already peeling, were going to last the summer. This is not surprising. The logic of fast fashion applies to modern architecture too: all temporary, all disappearing. I was particularly ecstatic to see that some kids had forsaken the stairs and found a little strip from which to slide down the sides of the Pyramid, like we used to do. I told myself, “Yes! You can’t stop kids. There will always be a way out.” Later, I read that the architects of the new Pyramid had left that little strip on purpose, to encourage sliding. 

Barbara Halla is a writer and translator from Tirana. She is pursuing a PhD at Duke University on twentieth-century literature, women’s writing, and feminist thought. Barbara has served as Criticism editor for Asymptote, a journal of literature in translation. In addition to Asymptote, her writing has appeared in Reading in Translation, EuropeNow, and Three Percent, among others.