The IT revolution reshaping Tirana

He continues in this manner for a good hour, repeating the same concept in almost excellent Italian, describing, clarifying, quoting numbers, statistics, names of people and places. It’s noon on a sunny spring Sunday and I’m on the phone with Erion Veliaj, the mayor of Tirana since 2015, and former Minister of Social Welfare and Youth under Prime Minister Edi Rama. The idea is to find out how the future of Albania’s capital city, which in 2022 is also the European Youth Capital, is progressing. Because there’ no doubt that something is happening there. «For several decades - continues Veliaj - we were the Pyongyang of Europe. Following the fall of communism in the nineties, Tirana saw a

five-fold growth, from 200,000 to one million denizens. A chaotic and out-of-control development: the city resembled a huge shantytown. Edi Rama, mayor of Tirana from 2001 to 2011, began to make some order; then I arrived, and here we are at the second round: after the ‘cleaning’ came the execution phase. A law has gathered 27 municipalities into the new metropolitan city of Tirana so we now have a city of 42 square kilometers and a combined urban area of 1,250. With Italian architect Stefano Boeri we launched the Tirana 2030 project and now everything is more operational: architects and artists have flocked from all over the world, including Switzerland, to transform the Albanian capital into a kaleidoscopic polycentric city, focused on hospitality and quality of life. Of course, there’s still a lot to do, but things here are really going at a very fast pace. At this moment, the entire city is a single ongoing construction site, a work in progress like the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona». In fact, with an increase of 30,000 inhabitants per year there are a lot of things to fix and hazards to avoid.

You could easily find yourself in a slum 2.0. «With Boeri we have designed a continuous orbital woodland system around the city, with two million trees, parks and protected natural reserves: it is our ‘permeable wall’ responsible for alerting us to the quality of life and eco-balance. From that moment on, before building, we think twice». But in all this, what about the restoration of historic sites? «There is a little confusion here - Veliaj explains - because Tirana is a city with a very limited past. We have the remains of an ancient Roman villa, a Byzantine castle, two Ottoman mosques, some Fascist architecture and that desired by Nikita Khrushchev. And very little else. Several buildings were in a very bad state of conservation and this forced us to think about it: cities cannot be warehouses of useless objects, invaded by cars and rats, but they must welcome and allow life and people to sprout, in the cleanest way possible. We have therefore decided to save and restore places of value, but at the same time to reserve the nostalgic speeches for visits to museums. The residents have understood: ‘Not In My Back Yard’ is a rare complaint to hear here in Tirana, most of the citizens are very young and eager for the future. And if you ask me which template we have in our head, I will answer: Tel Aviv». The entire policy of education and culture in Tirana has effectively been rethought and set on the acquisition of technological skills, in particular computer skills. The era of low wage call centers, now outsourced to India, has ended. Now we are entering the era of coding, which retains young people locally. «Of course those who live in the provinces are still interested in Switzerland or Italy. But their plan B is to move to Tirana. I’m the manager of plan B, which has proven to work better».