mass expulsions to create a sustainable urbanism in flux?
In the face of a global climate crisis, we have been told that our cities need to be better prepared, freshly equipped with sustainable design features like green corridors to improve air quality, reduce heat islands and enhance local stormwater retention. It follows a longstanding critique that our buildings are too static and unresponsive to their environments. In other words, we need an urbanism that is more fluctuating and temporary. What we have not been told, however, is how implementing such projects in corrupt and semi-authoritarian contexts like Albania’s risks not only failing to accomplish sustainable goals but also catalyses gross human rights violations through forced evictions. Described by Stefano Boeri Architetti as a reclaiming of the landscape, the Tirana Riverside Project stretches two kilometres from east to west, the TR2030 Masterplan then wraps around the urban core in concentric ‘green rings,’ both projects impacting large swaths of the city. It’s a zone so large that it would take over four hours to walk it in its entirety. With whole districts identified for clearance and replacement with new forest trails, it is more a claiming of vulnerable lives to bolster elite power and profits. While “obsessing over the many novel ways a housing complex can be designed to accommodate trees,” 6 the project misses the larger mark of protecting civilians and preventing the coerced and involuntary mass displacement of people from their lands and communities. Ironically, it is the proposal itself that has become the greatest threat to area residents, not future climate hazards or pandemics.
As architects and urban designers embrace the idea that cities need to be more integrative of ecological systems, we need to have a serious conversation about what this means when imposed on existing contexts. Simply rolling out a new green carpet over established communities is not going to get us where we want to be, socially or environmentally. We also need to discuss how green initiatives are being usurped by corruption, acting more as illicit revenue generation and money laundering schemes than livelihood improvement in communities. On a very real level, Stefano Boeri Architetti’s projects impact the entirety of the city, exacerbating affordability far beyond their local footprint through the fuelling of high-end speculative development. The cool calculations of demolition compensation do not take into account the rising cost of living these projects fuel, let alone the embodied energy of destroying buildings and their surroundings. Narratives of ‘restored landscapes’ further work on an ideological level to demoralize existing communities. Native plant species are introduced using the rhetoric of ‘natural belonging’, maliciously implying the unnatural presence of area residents who are largely stigmatized rural migrants framed xenophobically as non-natives in the capital city.
all images Harris-Brandts + Goci
Newly built monotonous apartment blocks for the ‘Tirana Riverside Project,’ a 29-hectare ‘smart city,’ ‘pandemic-proof’ eco-district designed by famous Italian firm, Stefano Boeri Architetti.
6. Boeri, Stefano, Maria Chiara Pastore and Livia Shamir. Green obsession: Trees towards cities, humans towards forests. Barcelona: Actar, 2021
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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