Toward a contemporary Tirana Abstract Public spaces: The pacemaker of urban regenerative processes for Sustainable People-Friendly cities

Abstract

The city and its suburbs, traditionally distinct from each-other, are now forming new forms like megalopolis, expanding city or territorial city. The relationships between the parts of the city are becoming more and more articulated, intertwined with memory and traces. The territory, though its definition remains vague, constitutes the unit of measurement and horizon of human phenomena, the reading of which will aim to identify the traces still present of these disappeared territorial processes . "After two centuries during which the management of the territory had known as the only recipe the Tabula rasa, is thus traced a conception which considers the territory no longer as an almost abstract operating field , but as the result of a long and slow layering that is necessary to know to be able to intervene... The territory, as overhead of traces and past readings, is more like a palimpsest. " (Corboz, 1983). Tirana, the capital city of Albania, is one of the rare cases of overlapping of Mediterranean-Byzantine and Mitteleuropean-ex-URSS cultures, representing in the best way the cultural mix, the most important actual phenomenon. It is important to understand Tirana's palimpsest in order to better understand the cultural influences on it (those physically deleted and those who still exist). How did the city responded to this stress? How has it changed the urban-rural relationship, which until 1990 gave total prevalence to the countryside? External stimuli received by the city of Tirana has been at the highest levels and the shock of the '90s have left their indelible imprints in the territory. In the perspective of globalization, what are the signs of confrontation with other cultures in the territory?