Nëntoka, një ëndërr

When Paris built the Chemin de Fer Métropolitaine at the turn of the last century, the city’s inhabitants quickly truncated the name of the system to Métro, thereby consolidating the semantic conjunction between “any urban railway system or network, esp. one which runs wholly or partly underground” and “the chief town or city of a country (occas. of a province or district), esp. the one which is the seat of government; a capital”¹. Ever since, metros and metropolises have implied each other: metropolises must have metros, and metros are not found outside of metropolises. Witness the Soviet Union’s flurry of metro-building in the capitals of the annexed SSRs, in an attempt to create miniature Moscows pointing back to the primate city. Witness the planning and construction of Los Angeles’s railway system in the 1980s—a project that had as much to do with legitimating this plastic city’s imaginative claim to metropolitan-ness as it did with shuttling people around town.

Tirana, the capital of Albania, was for most of the twentieth century a micropole, kept deliberately tiny by the mix of manic paranoid totalitarianism and genuine idealistic pro-ruralism of the Hoxha regime.² Little more than a regional market town before 1900, it was selected as capital principally for its geographic centrality; it had never served any role on the regional stage prior to Albanian statehood. The early Albanian republican governments, followed by the Zog kingdom and the Italian puppet state, laid the groundwork for Tirana’s ceremonial center, and the Communists added the conventional trappings of structured socialist ideology soon afterwards.

When the Communist state collapsed in 1990–1991, however, Tirana exploded, becoming the pulse-point for a society in flux. With the internal passport system lifted, tens of thousands of peasants and provincials poured into the capital, ballooning its population from under 200,000 to an urban agglomeration of nearly a million within two decades. The bulk of this migration has been entirely unregulated by the woefully unequipped Albanian state, and, beyond the city’s central core, which still generally follows the emphases of the old Communist layout, the city is a warren of haphazard construction.

What would it take to make Tirana properly metropolitan? Few of the visions of a future Tirana have gained serious traction. Several master plans for the city have been proposed and discarded as various political parties have taken hold of the mayor’s office. The national government and municipal government, often at loggerheads, rarely agree on the apportionment of responsibility for physical planning in the capital. The state wasted €14 million in 2005 when it withdrew from a contract to build a light rail service to the airport.

At some point, to become metropolitan, Tirana will need a metro. At present a network of hard-working but dilapidated buses stitches the city together, but these dinosaurs—most of which have been discharged from transport systems elsewhere in Europe and still bear the languages and advertised destinations of their original homes—do not furnish Tirana with very much in the way of a modern commuter infrastructure.

What follows below is an imaginary proposal for what a Tirana metro—a Nëntoka system—might look like. This is, of course, a work of imagination; it is enormously unlikely that such a system will be built in the city.³ Even if Tirana were to miraculously stumble upon a pile of billions of euros in infrastructure money, it is not clear that a building a metro system would be the most desirable investment. But the having of a metro is as much about imagination as it is about infrastructure. Metros stage and embody national aspirations, as in the cult of Stalinism built into the Moscow Metro or the tarry smell of commercial exchange wafting from Chicago’s El. They structure the rhythms and priorities of the city, elevating certain areas to prominence and circuiting less desirable zones. In their topological webs, they systematize the geography of the city and offer it a scopic legibility apprehensible to everyone from the planner to the commuter to the tourist just arrived.

I’ve proposed a network of four major lines in Tirana: (1) A red line running north-south from the market to the Selitë/Tirana e Re residential region; (2) A brown line running east-west from the industrial Yzberish suburb to the residential and commercial Sauk, with a tramway extension to the leisure and tourist site Petrelë; (3) A blue line running east-west from the airport to the Dajti suburb and its cable-car station, with a tramway spur running from Laprakë to the community of Vorë via the shopping centers; and (4) A green line ring linking the lines, generally following the path of the existing Unazë ring road.

In proposing the network, I have highly privileged sites at the center of the city, and have no doubt placed stations here with greater density than is necessary. I have also tried to add a slight element of “irrationality” to the plan, which appears as a course of events in all transport-planning systems, as a result of contested property ownership, troublesome soil profiles, or even pure whim. As such, this map is distinctly not a technical plan for what a Tirana metro system might look like; instead, it is deliberately an escapist dream of a parallel Tirana, the aspirations of built modernity here taking the form of a subway map’s colorful and playful web.

(Click for full images)