2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Forced Evictions: Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing . https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/forced-evictions Accessed 10 May 2023. 3. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 4. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Kombinat: The Unseen and Their Architectural Oddkins’. Architectural Design , vol. 92, no. 2, March 2022, pp.30-35. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2790 5. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Is Tirana’s Rapid Transformation Progress or Erasure?’ Kosovo 2.0 . 14 July 2022. https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/author/ dorinapllumbi/ corridors. In portions of the neighbourhood already cleared and on-track for completion, there is little optimism that the previous community life can be shoe-horned back into these sterile new apartment buildings. And while residents will soon be able to walk designer dogs through a riverfront leisure spine or play tennis with new upper-middle-class neighbours, they cannot sustain their livelihoods through urban agriculture or customise their residences to accommodate family growth. What is most likely then is that in the face of their inability to meet community needs these apartments will become another type of temporary urbanism, sold off to speculative investors as vacant assets or converted into turnkey Airbnbs.  As of July 2023, approximately 50% of 05 Maji remains frozen as- is, partially demolished, partially in-tact, with residents on constant standby for the next round of demolitions. It is a situation where people perennially prepare their most precious belongings for immediate evacuation, fearful of an eviction that might come today, tomorrow, in a month’s time, or perhaps never at all. 05th Maji is thus temporary not because it is self-built but rather because it is in an ongoing state of threatened erasure—a state that has meant everything is suspended in the temporary: normal daily life put on hold, the desires to invest in and upgrade properties seized. Planting new crops or hanging wedding photos—even cleaning the windows—all potentially acts in vain. The psychological damage of such an existence does not end with demolition but stays with residents in the years to come. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) notes, forced evictions like this “intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and invariably affect the poorest, most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially women, children, minorities.” 2 The violent erasure of 05 Maji is an example of what Urban Sociologist and Colombia University Professor Saskia Sassen has termed expulsions . 3 It is a phenomenon now witnessed across the city and one growing with intensity, as the work of Albanian architect and urban scholar Dorina Pllumbi has shown. 4,5 Overall, these expulsions lay bare the challenges of retrofitting cities for more climate-conscious futures and the risks of such efforts being hijacked and greenwashed by corrupt elites.
Concrete columns extending from top floors support future construction for inter-generational living.
all images Harris-Brandts + Goci
The remains of property demolition from January 2022.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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