La fragmentation de l’espace urbain postsocialiste en Albanie

After 30 years of controlled and decentralized urban development, the Albanian urban space has gone through a brutal transition. At the fall of the regime in 1991, the network of small and medium-sized cities set up during communism initially survived, at the cost of an important “ruralization” of urban spaces, while the big cities developed a dual character, opposing centers and new “informal” neighborhoods with very different socio-demographic compositions, due to contrasting migratory sequences. After a first decade of informal boom, the redeployment of the real estate market in Greater Tirana, in the form of a dense suburbanization, has confirmed the segregation drawn by the informal urban fabric, further reinforced by an institutional reform excluding immigration suburbs of the municipal territory. The tremendous growth of the Tirana-Durrës metropolitan area has allowed addressing the under-urbanization problem, but this urban mirror of Albania seems more fragmented than ever.