Where will you be when the towers of Rama are finished?

Alfred Lela

Imagine Tirana when the forty or more multi-story towers have shed their facades, turned on the lights, and are full of businesses and residents. At first glance, there is nothing better: the glow of the lights, the seductive employees of private companies who leave behind a perfumed plume of life, transactions, negotiations, la bella vita...

But beneath the surface is the carnage of what's to come next for the entire city.

Adding the resident or working population to a limited city perimeter, all within the small Ring or even more closely around the former Block will automatically come with a multiplication of the number of cars, which means traffic, with all consequences. The mouth of the bottle, which stretches today from the Ministry of the Interior to the "Plazza" hotel, will soon be a needle's hole where the government and the rich will try to screw the whole city.  

We will face an urban collapse with multiple problems: traffic, noise, environmental pollution, and stress.

The city's heart will have less greenery, more concrete, more movement, less air, and, therefore, Tirana's summers will be a few degrees hotter.

This is how it will be, and no relief will come from the fact that those who design, allow, build, and enjoy the towers do not live in them but in the green suburbs of Tirana, in villas whose yards are several times larger things like the traffic bottleneck where the drivers and pedestrians of Tirana have to pass daily.

Driven and indifferent to the noise and traffic that does not penetrate the expensive soundproof cars, the Tirana they have built according to their taste and appetite will be hostile to the rest of the population.

It is not too late. The most annoying will emigrate. The most submissive will shoot slingshots from the walls of social networks. The cataclysm will never become a central debate in the public opinion and the media because the main TV channels are also lovers of towers.

Without dignified public transport, no subway, no tram, no trains, with bicycle lanes opened as a publicity stunt, with rows of trees that, before the height of the towers, look like cacti in the desert, the city will turn into a body whose capillaries are full of bad cholesterol, in a big belly of gluttony without a fetus.

Tirana will no longer give birth to normality. These towers are nothing more than the anterooms of Oncology, a tumor tomorrow where the poor who look down on the towers with greed will wander like zombies in the corridors of 'free healthcare'; the rich, authors, or tower dwellers have the particular fate of their money: they can go to Vienna or Bergamo. In the end, everyone becomes equal in the Herd.  

If Tirana is already a city without a future and is no city for regular people , will Shkodra also surrender to the mania for towers?

The first project, the Rozafa hotel, was presented a few days ago by Rama, architect Sinani of all this vertical fury, with the ease and certainty with which Albert Speer unfolded the architectural project of the Reich.

Imposing a postmodern divide right where the Venetian-Ottoman-Austrian-Italian-Albanian history of Shkodra begins requires rural courage. Shkodra has its urban atelier, a gift of the centuries, and entering it with a tyrannosaur is a tyrant act. Shkodra can and should be improved, but not destroyed.

Rozafa Tower may be beautiful in itself, but in contrast to Tourism, the 'Rozafa' of the time of a previous tyrant will resemble no better than the tyranny of Tirana, where "Intercontinental" and "15 floors" look like two prisoners of different heights, wearing uncombined pajamas, who have gone out for air on the prison roof.

If this is a race between Ed's paranoia and Enver's ghost, it will be even worse for Tirana and especially Shkodra.