Tirana: Its History and a Post-Socialist Perspective on Urban Growth and Transformation between 1991–2016

Abstract

This paper examines Tirana’s urbanization process from a socio-morphological perspective. It presents a quick understanding on how Tirana came to be a town, and then how it became the capital of Albania in 1920. This material reflects on different urban interventions that the city has undergone in different social settings and political influences, displaying these transformations during contrasting socio-political periods through images, diagrams and graphs built from existing statistical data and field-collected data and information. The timeframe for presented statistical analyses covers the period between 1989–2016.

Keywords

• albania
• tirana
• townplanning
• urban growth
• post-socialist transformation