Shape-Memory Cities. Through The Urban Archipelago In Contemporary Albania

The paper is focused on a methodology carried out to approach landscape and urban design, on the base of a codified process, developed during my PhD research. The word shape-memory is usually attached to an alloy that “remembers” its original shape and that is able to adapt to changes. We can translate the same reasoning to certain Albanian towns and cities, looking for those historical islands, or urban facts, that each contemporary urban environment hide and overwrite. Given the real-estate turmoil of the last decades, the finding of a latent historical structure – made of edifices, squares, views, spaces, and blocks – can be crucial to keep working on the future development of Albania without loosening its contact with the past, which can be in continuity or opposition. But still well aware of it. As Jan Neutelings pointed out, we need to find new metaphors to read those diffused cities that do not establish a recognizable relationship between the inside and outside, figure and ground, city and countryside. His metaphor of the patchwork, as well as that of the archipelago (Ungers’ manifesto for Berlin) and many others, deflated the idea of a comprehensive large-scale design conducted by an isolated agent (architect, office, or institution). The proposed work will analyze eleven Albanian case studies discovering the archipelago of historical islands divided into landscape, architecture, infrastructure, urban spaces, to be the core of a pinpoint approach to urban design.