Lexojeni pak
Albania's Capital Reaches for the Sky
Modern Pragmatism in Tirana
Martin Woker
More than a decade after the fall of the Enver Hoxha regime, in the minds of most people Albania remains more or less a blank spot on the map. Reports of smuggling, the trade in human beings, blood feuds and political chicanery have veiled all positive developments from general view. But Tirana is experiencing the blossoming of a little-noticed liberal modernism which is turning the Albanian capital into a kind of regional hub.
The Sky Tower Café in downtown Tirana is not open for business yet. But I am fortunate enough to be allowed a view of the Albanian metropolis from this modern, revolving restaurant. The picture-book panorama from the 16th floor gives some idea of the connection between social change and urban development. In the 12 years since the collapse of the Enver Hoxha brand of socialism, the population of the Albanian capital has increased fourfold; today, about one third of the country's roughly 2.5 million people live in Tirana. While elsewhere in the world big cities faced with such a rate of urbanization tend to collapse and confine the poverty and misery to wildly expanding slums on their periphery, Tirana has chosen a different path. The city is growing upward, as if it were located in some Asian boom region rather than in post-socialist Southeastern Europe, where from Ljubljana to Skopje and from Pristina to Sofia, newly won freedom is being expressed in belts of small, monotonous, cookie-cutter houses - a Balkan answer to America's suburban sprawl.
High-Rise Is the Key
Until Albania's systemic change, life in a high-rise building was reserved for the country's few foreign visitors. The Hotel Tirana, built in 1979 on central Skanderbeg Square, was the city's only structure with more than 10 stories. Today there are close to 200 buildings at least 10 stories high within the city limits; no one knows the exact number.
From the Sky Tower Café there is a good view of the former residence of the man who held this country in an iron grip from 1944 until his death in 1985, who decreed a strict, socialist self-sufficiency and permitted himself to cut fraternal ties first with Moscow, then with Beijing, in order to prove to his people that his "pure" dogma was the right way to go. Enver Hoxha lived in a two-story residence in what was then a government quarter hermetically sealed off from the People. Compared to the nine square meters of living space which his classless society allotted to each resident, Hoxha had plenty of room. Today the government uses part of his residence as an official guest house. The building also contains a private school and a fast-food restaurant. Directly across from the Great Leader's residence, Tirana's contemporary youth congregate in the Cowboy Pub Manhattan, which is located in one of the many high-rises that surround Hoxha's erstwhile home and whose chic terrace cafés have turned the neighborhood into the city's hottest spot.
"These days the young people just sit around in cafés and talk. Money is the only thing they're interested in," says an independent-minded university lecturer who managed to feed himself and his family even in Hoxha's time. A quotation by the Albanian leader in the forewords to his academic works insured his being left in peace. Not everything was bad in those days, he says. Every square foot of land was cultivated, illiteracy was successfully fought, and equality of the sexes reached a level unique in that part of the world.
A university graduate who completed part of her studies abroad after the end of the Hoxha regime confirms the generally high educational level of women in Albania. Her partner confronts me with the rhetorical question of whether, in the course of my visits to Kosovo, I have ever interviewed an Albanian in the company of his wife. "Do they take their wives along to all their dinners with you Westerners? Of course not! And that's the difference between us." The people of Tirana perceive Kosovo, and also the Albanian-settled parts of western Macedonia, as profoundly provincial, utterly stagnant in their social development.
Urbanity by Decree
Does this lead to the conclusion that Hoxha's socialism, while driving the country into economic ruin, at the same time laid the groundwork for its liberal modernization?
Yes and no, is the response of Yilli Pango, director of the Institute for Social Psychology at Tirana University. "We were proud, but we couldn't survive on that," is how he sums up the situation under the old regime. After the change, the massive flight from the land took Tirana totally by surprise. The capital became the transit center for all those who could no longer make a livelihood off the land - and that was almost the entire population. Emigration was organized from Tirana, mostly to Italy or Greece. The city experienced chaotic growth; in 1997 it was gripped by the wave of collective fury which had spread over the entire country against all aspects of government, and only since the new mayor, Edi Rama, took office two years ago have things quieted down again. The unorthodox mayor, a former basketball player and artist, has since set about with uncompromising determination to impose his idea of livable urbanity. Successfully, too. His personally designed color scheme for decayed house façades, which has been applied hundreds of times now, is not only well worth viewing, it has given the city's populace a sense of collective responsibility toward their urban environment which is virtually unparalleled elsewhere in East European communities.
"It's true, the people are proud of their city again," says the social psychologist. That is the only explanation for why the mayor's other drastic measures have been swallowed without great protest. Hundreds of illegally built structures set up on public land in downtown Tirana have been torn down, the sidewalks are clean and garbage disposal functions. Pango suspects that, behind this process, there is a rapidly developing sense of civic awareness, which in turn is based on a deep-rooted patriotism among Albanians. The majority of Albanian emigrants, he says, are unhappy abroad and return as soon as they have earned a little money - not to their native villages, but to Tirana and an apartment on the fourth, eighth or twelfth floor of one of the city's many new apartment houses.
Why don't the returnees build separate houses for themselves, where they could live either as a nuclear or an extended family or clan, as people do in places like Kosovo? Isn't that what one would expect from Albanians, who are generally characterized as a society dominated by family structures?
Yilli Pango's response is that what happens in Kosovo or western Macedonia is not the rule in Albania itself. Since Hoxha's time, the populace has been forced into a life style involving multi-family homes; high-rise apartment blocks were built even in the most remote villages. Those were the only buildings with electricity and running water. So Albanians have become accustomed to living under one roof with their neighbors. In their minds, that is linked to progress and comfort.
The Laws of the Marketplace
For the past two years, Aslan and Vitoria and their now five-year-old daughter have been living on the seventh floor of a new, centrally located, 10-story apartment house in Tirana. He is a journalist, she a government worker. Their 70-square-meter apartment cost them the equivalent of about 30,000 Swiss francs, which they paid in cash thanks to their own savings and a loan from a relative abroad. The couple is typical of a new class of middle-class consumers in Tirana, says a real estate broker. He ascribes the capital's vertical growth to a weak government which is incapable of providing adequate infrastructure in suburban areas. He also stresses horrendous land prices, which favor vertical construction. But that cannot be the whole story.
A young, Italian-trained architect expounds on the laws of the housing market as it has functioned since the 1993 reprivatization. The usual thing is for owners of adjacent land parcels in downtown Tirana to join forces and form a company to build a high-rise building. They finance the construction with advance sales of the apartments and take their earnings in the form of ownership of completed units. So, the higher they build, the bigger their profits. The architect admits that the process of acquiring a building permit is often accelerated by the payment of bribes; the same method can reportedly be used to silence neighbors' objections. The authorities examine the building design before construction begins to see if it meets their standards. Our young architect prefers not to pass judgment as to whether those standards are adequate to withstand the seismic activity in northwestern Albania. But he does see one thing very clearly: that the market encourages the building of apartments rather than single-family homes, even if their prices would be comparable. The necessary financing largely flows back from Albanian communities abroad, which provided $168 million in the first quarter of this year according to official figures.
Far-Reaching Pragmatism
Vitoria and Aslan have grown quite comfortable in their apartment building. Contact with their neighbors has come through the children; the owners of the building's 40 apartment units had not known each other previously and came from various parts of the country. Aslan is a Muslim of Bosnian ancestry and grew up in the north; Vitoria comes from a Greek Orthodox household in the southeast. The couple have agreed that they will leave their daughter free to choose for herself one day which religion she will follow, if any. "As far as I'm concerned, she can become a Buddhist," says the young father, who maintains that the salvation of one's soul is a private concern. Such an emancipated view of ethnicity and religion is the rule rather than the exception in this urban milieu. The contrast with the bigotry to be found everywhere in the ruins of the former Yugoslavia could hardly be more extreme.
Is all of this a result of Hoxha's brutal imposition of his views on the country, declaring it the world's first officially atheistic nation?
"Albanians have always been big on pragmatism," says Pango. How they deal with religion is guided by practical considerations which can be traced far back in their history and continue to mold their daily lives. "We do not want to have chaos - and that's possible even without religious authority," declares the social psychologist, adding that Albania's new society is growing up in Tirana, which is now the center of regional development.
His words continue to echo the following day. On the shore of Tirana's exceedingly beautiful reservoir, I see people young and old, men and women, individually and in groups, performing their early-morning calisthenics against the backdrop of the city's growing skyline. A scene of urban peace.
November 7, 2002 / First published in German, October 30, 2002
Albania's Capital Reaches for the Sky
Modern Pragmatism in Tirana
Martin Woker
More than a decade after the fall of the Enver Hoxha regime, in the minds of most people Albania remains more or less a blank spot on the map. Reports of smuggling, the trade in human beings, blood feuds and political chicanery have veiled all positive developments from general view. But Tirana is experiencing the blossoming of a little-noticed liberal modernism which is turning the Albanian capital into a kind of regional hub.
The Sky Tower Café in downtown Tirana is not open for business yet. But I am fortunate enough to be allowed a view of the Albanian metropolis from this modern, revolving restaurant. The picture-book panorama from the 16th floor gives some idea of the connection between social change and urban development. In the 12 years since the collapse of the Enver Hoxha brand of socialism, the population of the Albanian capital has increased fourfold; today, about one third of the country's roughly 2.5 million people live in Tirana. While elsewhere in the world big cities faced with such a rate of urbanization tend to collapse and confine the poverty and misery to wildly expanding slums on their periphery, Tirana has chosen a different path. The city is growing upward, as if it were located in some Asian boom region rather than in post-socialist Southeastern Europe, where from Ljubljana to Skopje and from Pristina to Sofia, newly won freedom is being expressed in belts of small, monotonous, cookie-cutter houses - a Balkan answer to America's suburban sprawl.
High-Rise Is the Key
Until Albania's systemic change, life in a high-rise building was reserved for the country's few foreign visitors. The Hotel Tirana, built in 1979 on central Skanderbeg Square, was the city's only structure with more than 10 stories. Today there are close to 200 buildings at least 10 stories high within the city limits; no one knows the exact number.
From the Sky Tower Café there is a good view of the former residence of the man who held this country in an iron grip from 1944 until his death in 1985, who decreed a strict, socialist self-sufficiency and permitted himself to cut fraternal ties first with Moscow, then with Beijing, in order to prove to his people that his "pure" dogma was the right way to go. Enver Hoxha lived in a two-story residence in what was then a government quarter hermetically sealed off from the People. Compared to the nine square meters of living space which his classless society allotted to each resident, Hoxha had plenty of room. Today the government uses part of his residence as an official guest house. The building also contains a private school and a fast-food restaurant. Directly across from the Great Leader's residence, Tirana's contemporary youth congregate in the Cowboy Pub Manhattan, which is located in one of the many high-rises that surround Hoxha's erstwhile home and whose chic terrace cafés have turned the neighborhood into the city's hottest spot.
"These days the young people just sit around in cafés and talk. Money is the only thing they're interested in," says an independent-minded university lecturer who managed to feed himself and his family even in Hoxha's time. A quotation by the Albanian leader in the forewords to his academic works insured his being left in peace. Not everything was bad in those days, he says. Every square foot of land was cultivated, illiteracy was successfully fought, and equality of the sexes reached a level unique in that part of the world.
A university graduate who completed part of her studies abroad after the end of the Hoxha regime confirms the generally high educational level of women in Albania. Her partner confronts me with the rhetorical question of whether, in the course of my visits to Kosovo, I have ever interviewed an Albanian in the company of his wife. "Do they take their wives along to all their dinners with you Westerners? Of course not! And that's the difference between us." The people of Tirana perceive Kosovo, and also the Albanian-settled parts of western Macedonia, as profoundly provincial, utterly stagnant in their social development.
Urbanity by Decree
Does this lead to the conclusion that Hoxha's socialism, while driving the country into economic ruin, at the same time laid the groundwork for its liberal modernization?
Yes and no, is the response of Yilli Pango, director of the Institute for Social Psychology at Tirana University. "We were proud, but we couldn't survive on that," is how he sums up the situation under the old regime. After the change, the massive flight from the land took Tirana totally by surprise. The capital became the transit center for all those who could no longer make a livelihood off the land - and that was almost the entire population. Emigration was organized from Tirana, mostly to Italy or Greece. The city experienced chaotic growth; in 1997 it was gripped by the wave of collective fury which had spread over the entire country against all aspects of government, and only since the new mayor, Edi Rama, took office two years ago have things quieted down again. The unorthodox mayor, a former basketball player and artist, has since set about with uncompromising determination to impose his idea of livable urbanity. Successfully, too. His personally designed color scheme for decayed house façades, which has been applied hundreds of times now, is not only well worth viewing, it has given the city's populace a sense of collective responsibility toward their urban environment which is virtually unparalleled elsewhere in East European communities.
"It's true, the people are proud of their city again," says the social psychologist. That is the only explanation for why the mayor's other drastic measures have been swallowed without great protest. Hundreds of illegally built structures set up on public land in downtown Tirana have been torn down, the sidewalks are clean and garbage disposal functions. Pango suspects that, behind this process, there is a rapidly developing sense of civic awareness, which in turn is based on a deep-rooted patriotism among Albanians. The majority of Albanian emigrants, he says, are unhappy abroad and return as soon as they have earned a little money - not to their native villages, but to Tirana and an apartment on the fourth, eighth or twelfth floor of one of the city's many new apartment houses.
Why don't the returnees build separate houses for themselves, where they could live either as a nuclear or an extended family or clan, as people do in places like Kosovo? Isn't that what one would expect from Albanians, who are generally characterized as a society dominated by family structures?
Yilli Pango's response is that what happens in Kosovo or western Macedonia is not the rule in Albania itself. Since Hoxha's time, the populace has been forced into a life style involving multi-family homes; high-rise apartment blocks were built even in the most remote villages. Those were the only buildings with electricity and running water. So Albanians have become accustomed to living under one roof with their neighbors. In their minds, that is linked to progress and comfort.
The Laws of the Marketplace
For the past two years, Aslan and Vitoria and their now five-year-old daughter have been living on the seventh floor of a new, centrally located, 10-story apartment house in Tirana. He is a journalist, she a government worker. Their 70-square-meter apartment cost them the equivalent of about 30,000 Swiss francs, which they paid in cash thanks to their own savings and a loan from a relative abroad. The couple is typical of a new class of middle-class consumers in Tirana, says a real estate broker. He ascribes the capital's vertical growth to a weak government which is incapable of providing adequate infrastructure in suburban areas. He also stresses horrendous land prices, which favor vertical construction. But that cannot be the whole story.
A young, Italian-trained architect expounds on the laws of the housing market as it has functioned since the 1993 reprivatization. The usual thing is for owners of adjacent land parcels in downtown Tirana to join forces and form a company to build a high-rise building. They finance the construction with advance sales of the apartments and take their earnings in the form of ownership of completed units. So, the higher they build, the bigger their profits. The architect admits that the process of acquiring a building permit is often accelerated by the payment of bribes; the same method can reportedly be used to silence neighbors' objections. The authorities examine the building design before construction begins to see if it meets their standards. Our young architect prefers not to pass judgment as to whether those standards are adequate to withstand the seismic activity in northwestern Albania. But he does see one thing very clearly: that the market encourages the building of apartments rather than single-family homes, even if their prices would be comparable. The necessary financing largely flows back from Albanian communities abroad, which provided $168 million in the first quarter of this year according to official figures.
Far-Reaching Pragmatism
Vitoria and Aslan have grown quite comfortable in their apartment building. Contact with their neighbors has come through the children; the owners of the building's 40 apartment units had not known each other previously and came from various parts of the country. Aslan is a Muslim of Bosnian ancestry and grew up in the north; Vitoria comes from a Greek Orthodox household in the southeast. The couple have agreed that they will leave their daughter free to choose for herself one day which religion she will follow, if any. "As far as I'm concerned, she can become a Buddhist," says the young father, who maintains that the salvation of one's soul is a private concern. Such an emancipated view of ethnicity and religion is the rule rather than the exception in this urban milieu. The contrast with the bigotry to be found everywhere in the ruins of the former Yugoslavia could hardly be more extreme.
Is all of this a result of Hoxha's brutal imposition of his views on the country, declaring it the world's first officially atheistic nation?
"Albanians have always been big on pragmatism," says Pango. How they deal with religion is guided by practical considerations which can be traced far back in their history and continue to mold their daily lives. "We do not want to have chaos - and that's possible even without religious authority," declares the social psychologist, adding that Albania's new society is growing up in Tirana, which is now the center of regional development.
His words continue to echo the following day. On the shore of Tirana's exceedingly beautiful reservoir, I see people young and old, men and women, individually and in groups, performing their early-morning calisthenics against the backdrop of the city's growing skyline. A scene of urban peace.
November 7, 2002 / First published in German, October 30, 2002