Tirana Rising: Urban Agglomeration as Challenge and Opportunity

 

By Luiza Hoxhaj

In recent decades, Tirana has transformed into the most visible symbol of accelerated urbanization in Albania. From a city with defined contours and clear functions, it has become a complex entity that absorbs people, investments, and ideas—while simultaneously experiencing intense environmental, infrastructural, and social tensions.

Tirana’s growth is no longer merely an urbanistic matter; it is a political, economic, and social event that challenges our concepts of planning, spatial justice, and the future of the livable city.

Tirana is today the country’s largest city, but also the most vulnerable to the effects of agglomeration: infrastructural overload, air pollution, the narrowing of public spaces and the gradual loss of their social function, increasing housing prices, and fragmentation of urban communities. These are symptoms of expansion occurring without a clear guiding framework.

As Tirana grows, so does its influence over surrounding cities. Yet Albania has not developed a proper metropolitan approach, as many European cities have, to manage urban sprawl.

Every city has internal sustainability limits: water resources, land capacity, manageable levels of pollution and transport, or even institutional capacity to serve its population. Growth beyond these limits creates tensions that, if left unaddressed, turn into urban crises.

Tirana has long been growing faster than its real capacities. Therefore, it is essential that its planning—and that of the entire metropolitan area—be guided by a balance between residents' actual needs and the resources that the city (and its surrounding territory) can provide.

Examples from Europe—such as Lille in France, Stuttgart in Germany, or Ljubljana in Slovenia—show that the challenges of agglomeration can be met through joint urban and regional planning agencies, coordinated governance among cities, and investment in integrated transport systems.

In this spirit, the Tirana–Durrës–Elbasan Triangle represents a golden opportunity to create a functional Albanian metropolis, one that is not based solely on Tirana’s growth, but on a wiser distribution of development.

As the housing stock increases by the day, and our cities stretch toward the peripheries at a pace often divorced from logic or need, more and more Tirana—though not only Tirana—resembles one of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” where urban layers grow like ever-tightening spirals, but without a true center. We have everything—except a real sense of livability.

Therefore, unless we return to the essence—to the real needs of residents, to available resources, and to social and spatial cohesion—our cities risk losing not only their form, but also their soul.

💬 This article is part of a reflection series on urban agglomeration in Albania and the Western Balkans, with a focus on coastal cities experiencing new development pressures.”